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Prose

Notes The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude. —”Of Adversity”
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.—“Of Marriage and Single Life”
There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person
loved: And therefore it was well said, That it is impossible to love and to be wise. —“Of Love”
They that deny a God destroy man’s nobility, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body,
and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature. —“Of Atheism”
A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart.
—“Of Friendship”
A man’s own observation, what he finds good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic
[medicine] to preserve health. —“Of Regiment of Health”
As the baggage is to an army, so is riches to virtue. —“Of Riches”
Death
On 9 April 1626 Bacon died of pneumonia while at Arundel mansion at Highgate outside London.
An influential account of the circumstances of his death was given by John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.
Aubrey has been criticised for his evident credulousness in this and other works; on the other
hand, he knew Thomas Hobbes, Bacon’s fellow-philosopher and friend. Aubrey’s vivid account,
which portrays Bacon as a martyr to experimental scientific method, had him journeying to Highgate
through the snow with the King’s physician when he is suddenly inspired by the possibility of
using the snow to preserve meat: “They were resolved they would try the experiment presently.
They alighted out of the coach and went into a poor woman’s house at the bottom of Highgate hill,
and bought a fowl, and made the woman exenterate it”.
After stuffing the fowl with snow, Bacon contracted a fatal case of pneumonia. Some people,
including Aubrey, consider these two contiguous, possibly coincidental events as related and
causative of his death: “The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he
could not return to his Lodging ... but went to the Earle of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where
they put him into ... a damp bed that had not been layn-in ... which gave him such a cold that in
2 or 3 days as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation.” Being unwittingly on his
deathbed, the philosopher wrote his last letter to his absent host and friend Lord Arundel:
My very good Lord,—I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his
life by trying an experiment about the burning of Mount Vesuvius; for I was also desirous to try
an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of bodies. As for the experiment
itself, it succeeded excellently well; but in the journey between London and Highgate, I was taken
with such a fit of casting as I know not whether it were the Stone, or some surfeit or cold, or
indeed a touch of them all three. But when I came to your Lordship’s House, I was not able to go
back, and therefore was forced to take up my lodging here, where your housekeeper is very
careful and diligent about me, which I assure myself your Lordship will not only pardon towards
him, but think the better of him for it. For indeed your Lordship’s House was happy to me, and I
kiss your noble hands for the welcome which I am sure you give me to it. I know how unfit it is
for me to write with any other hand than mine own, but by my troth my fingers are so disjointed
with sickness that I cannot steadily hold a pen.”
Another account appears in a biography by William Rawley, Bacon’s personal secretary and
chaplain: He died on the ninth day of April in the year 1626, in the early morning of the day then
celebrated for our Saviour’s resurrection, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, at the Earl of Arundel’s
house in Highgate, near London, to which place he casually repaired about a week before; God so
ordaining that he should die there of a gentle fever, accidentally accompanied with a great cold,
whereby the defluxion of rheum fell so plentifully upon his breast, that he died by suffocation.

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