Spedding is immutably wise, good, and delightful; not as immutably well in Body, I think, though he does not complain.
The great work went slowly on, but nothing as yet was published. Spedding had just taken over Ellis’s portion and was devoting himself to this. We get a glimpse of him again in FitzGerald’s letters:
I saw old Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved, and whose death-bed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon.
It was 1857 before the first three volumes appeared, followed by three others in 1858, and by the final volume in 1859. Ellis did not live to see the completion of the work, for he died in May of that year.
FitzGerald, writing in 1857 to Cowell, who was now in Calcutta, from Portland Terrace, where he lived during his early married life, says:
Spedding has been once here in near three months. His Bacon keeps coming out: his part, the Letters, etc., of Bacon, is not come yet; so it remains to be seen what he will do then, but I can’t help thinking he has let the Pot boil too long.
It was 1861, however, before the first volume of the Life and Letters appeared, and Spedding found that he had already been forestalled by Hepworth Dixon in The Story of Lord Bacon’s Life. In a note to the earliest letter printed, probably the earliest specimen remaining of Bacon’s handwriting, he says, with quiet contempt:
The copies of some of these letters lately published by Mr. Hepworth Dixon ... differ, I observe, very much from mine; most of them in the words and sense, more or less, and some in the name of the person writing, or the person written to, or both. But as mine are more intelligible, and were made with care and at leisure, and when my eyes were better than they are now, I do not suspect any material error in them, and have not thought it worth while to apply for leave to compare them again with the originals.
“I am very glad,” FitzGerald writes to Thompson, “to hear old Spedding is really getting his share of Bacon into Print: I doubt if it will be half as good as the “Evenings,” where Spedding was in the Passion which is wanted to fill his Sail for any longer Voyage.”
Some three years later, he says: