AMONG the many brilliant figures of Shakspere's time, none, save the great master himself, left so deep a mark on future ages as did Francis Bacon; and no career begun with fairer promise ever ended in more pathetic gloom. Not Sidney's gallant death upon the foreign field of battle, or even Raleigh's upon the scaffold, had the tragic sense of failure which darkened Bacon's life, apart from his work.

It has been said that to know the life of a great writer is a mistake, and, if ever this is true, it is so in the case of Bacon. What we learn from his

writings is a grand lofty philosophy which lifts us above the sordid temptations of the world, while in his life we see him always among the multitude, struggling, maybe, with difficulties, but constantly yielding to them; practising a morality no higher than that of his fellows; so that when the end comes, and his career is closed in gloom, and something akin to shame, we cannot help feeling

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that his fall is great in proportion to the heights to which his genius might have risen.

Francis Bacon was born three years before Shakspere, on the 22nd of January 1561, at York House, in the Strand. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was Lord Keeper to Queen Elizabeth, and his mother, Lady Ann (whose father had been tutor to Edward VI.), was a gifted and pious lady, and passionately attached to her two sons, Anthony and Francis.

Anthony was the elder by two years, and the brothers were devoted companions almost until his death. They were both delicate, and were brought up at home, either in London, amid the atmosphere of the Court, or in the beautiful countryseat of the family at Gorhambury. There among the woods and meadows, with flowers and birds for his daily playmates, Francis learned his first lessons of that communion with nature that was hereafter to bear such fruit.

Fair and graceful, well-born and carefully nurtured, noticed by the great folks of the day, and called by the Queen herself her "young Lord Keeper," what brighter opening could his life have had?

When he was twelve years old, and Anthony teen, they went together to Cambridge, and

studied at Trinity under Whitgift, who was then Master of the College, and afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury.

Later on, Francis went to Paris, and while he was there the death of his father took place, and he was thus, on the very threshold of his career, thrown almost entirely upon his own resources.

Not only had the Lord Keeper very little to leave to his younger son, but Francis lost by his death the natural introduction to public life which he needed, and which, had Sir Nicholas lived, would have been his by right.

He returned from France immediately, and entered at Gray's Inn, where for many years he and his brother lived in rooms together. Anthony, too, was poor, for Sir Nicholas had been married twice, and his property had passed to his eldest son by the first marriage.

Lady Ann and her two sons were devotedly attached to each other, though her stern selfcontrolled nature, with its deep religious sense, trained as she had been in a strictly Calvinistic household, made her a great contrast to her pleasure-loving and tolerant-minded sons.

They lived in London, she at Gorhambury, among her plants and her poultry, and many a letter she wrote them, of dictatorial motherly