Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has," writes Chamberlain, "no
manner of feeling of his fall, but continuing vain and idle in all his
humours as when he was at the highest." "I am said," Bacon himself
writes, "to have a feather in my head."
Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the moment, more than ever
turned to the future; but he had not given up hope of having a good deal
to say yet to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it seems
to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring of 1621 the King
called for his opinion concerning the reformation of Courts of Justice;
and Bacon, just sentenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds
to give his advice as if he were a Privy Councillor in confidential
employment. Early in the following year he, according to his fashion,
surveyed his position, and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes
of the _Commentarius Solutus_ of 1608, about points to be urged to the
King at an interview. Why should not the King employ him again? "Your
Majesty never chid me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault was
not against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act.
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