Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

156 FEANCIS BACON
the cold intense, the city blighted with plague, the war abroad
disastrous. Bacon remained at Gorhambury, " bard at work
on his Sylva Sylvarum." But that work is merely a newlyarranged
collection of old notes, and its construction would not
have been nearly sufficient occupation for such a mind. It
seems probable that Bacon was now engaged in putting together,
arranging, or polishing the works which he was about to leave
behiud, to be brought out in due season by the faithful friends
to whom he entrusted them, and to whom he must, at this
time, have given instructions as to their future disposition and
publication.
A Parliament was called at Westminster, for February, to
which he received the usual summons, for he had been restored
to his legal rights, and reinstated amongst his peers. But he
was too ill to obey the writ. He rode once to Gray's Inn, but it
was in April, and the severity of the winter had not yet passed.
He caught the cold of which he died. Taking the air one day
with his physician, Dr. Witherbourne, towards Higbgate, the
snow lying deep, it occurred to Bacon to inquire if flesh might
not be preserved in snow 1 as well as in salt. Pulliug up at a
small cottage near the foot of Higbgate Hill, he bought a hen
from an old woman, plucked and drew it; gathered up snow in
his hands, and stuffed it into the fowl. Smitten with a sudden
chill, but doubting the nature of his attack, Bacon drove to the
house of his friend Lord Arundel, close by, where Witherbourne
had him put into the bed from whence he rose no more.
It is hardly possible to keep patient on reading that the sheets
between which the invalid was laid " were damp, as no one
had slept in them for a year, " and, although the servants warmed
the bed with a pan of coals, the damp inflamed his cold.
From the first a gentle fever set in ; he lingered just a week;
and then, on the 9th of April, 1626, expired of congestion of
the lungs. 2
1 This idea was the original thought which has since given rise to the various
systems of preserving and transporting frozen meat from distant countries.
2 H. Dixon, from Court and Times of Charles, i. 74 ; Lord's Journal, iii. 492;
Aubrey, ii. 227.