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THE earliest composition of Bacon's which I have been able to discover is a letter written in his twentieth year from Gray's Inn, where he had not long before commenced his studies. From that time forward compositions succeed each other without any considerable interval, and in following them we shall accompany him step by step through his life. But it is necessary to begin by explaining who he was, and what he had been doing for the last nineteen years, and with what impressions, preparations, conditions, and prospects he was entering upon this new stage in his career.

He had been born among great events, and brought up among the persons who had to deal with them. It was on the 22nd of January, 1560-1,-while the young Queen of Scotland, a two-months' widow, was rejecting the terms of reconciliation with England which Elizabeth proffered, and a new Pope in the Vatican was preparing to offer the terms of reconciliation with Rome which Elizabeth rejected, that he came crying into the world, the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Ann, second daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, an accomplished lady, sister-inlaw to the then secretary of state, Sir William Cecil. There is no reason to suppose that he was regarded as a wonderful child. Of the first sixteen years of his life indeed nothing is known that distinguishes him from a hundred other clever and well-disposed boys. He was born at York House, his father's London residence, opening into the Strand (not yet a street) on the north, and sloping plea

VOL. I.

B

santly to the Thames (not yet built out) on the south. Sometimes there, and sometimes at Gorhambury in Hertfordshire, he passed his infancy; the youngest of eight children-six by a former marriage. In April, 1573,1 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, a little earlier than was then usual, being twelve years and three months old. There be resided in the same rooms with his brother Anthony (his own brother, two years older than himself), studying diligently, until Christmas, 1575; apparently with only one considerable interval (i. e. from the latter end of August, 1574, to the beginning of March 2), when the University was dispersed on account of the plague. On the 27th of the following June he and his brother Anthony were admitted "de societate magistrorum" of Gray's Inn ;3 that is, I suppose, ancients; a privilege to which they were entitled as the sons of a judge. If we add that during his residence at Cambridge he was rather sickly, as appears by the frequent payments to the "potigarie" in Whitgift's accounts, and that his talents or manners had already been remarked by the courtiers, and drawn upon him the special notice of the Queen herself, who would often talk with him and playfully call him the young Lord Keeper, we have all that is known about him for the first fifteen years and nine months of his life.

Brief however and barren as this record appears, it may help us, when studied by the light which his subsequent history throws back upon it, to understand in what manner and in what degree the accidents of his birth and education had prepared him for the scene on which he was entering. When the temperament is quick and sensitive, the desire of knowledge strong, and the faculties so vigorous, obedient, and equably developed that they find almost all things easy, the mind will commonly fasten upon the first object of interest that presents itself, with the ardour of a first love. Now these qualities, which so eminently distinguished Bacon as a man, must have been in him from a boy; and if we would know the source of those great impulses which began to work in him so early and continued to govern him so long, we must look for it among the circumstances by which his boyhood was surrounded. What his mother taught him we do not know; but we know that she was a learned, eloquent, and religious woman, full of affection and puritanic fervour, deeply interested in the condition of the Church, and per1 See Whitgift's accounts. Brit. Mag. vol. xxxiii. p. 444. 2 See Brit. Mag. vol. xxxii. p. 365.

3 See Gray's Inn Book of Orders, p. 56, under date 27th June, 18° Eliz.: "Ad hanc pensionem admissi sunt Anthonius Bacon, Franciscus Bacon, Willms. Bowes, Thomas Balgey, et Rogerus Wilbraham: ac p'.dt. Anthonius Bacon, Franciscus Bacon, et Willis. Bowes admissi sunt de societate mtror. et ceteri de mense clcor." 4 Vol. i. P. 4.

fectly believing that the cause of the Nonconformists was the whole cause of Christ. Such a mother could not but endeavour to lead her child's mind into the temple where her own treasure was laid up, and the child's mind, so led, could not but follow thither with awful curiosity and impressions not to be effaced. Neither do we know what his father taught him; but he appears to have designed him for the service of the State, and we need not doubt that the son of Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, and nephew of her principal Secretary, early imbibed a reverence for the mysteries of statesmanship, and a deep sense of the dignity, responsibility, and importance of the statesman's calling. It is probable that he was present more than once, when old enough to observe and understand such matters, at the opening of Parliament, and heard his father, standing at the Queen's side, declare to the assembled Lords and Commons the causes of their meeting. It is certain that he was more than once in the immediate presence of the Queen herself, smiled on by the countenance which was looked up to by all the young and all the old around him with love and fear and reverence. Everything that he saw and heard ; the alarms, the hopes, the triumphs of the time; the magnitude of the interests which depended upon her government; the high flow of loyalty which buoyed her up and bore her forward; the imposing character of her council, a character which still stands out distinctly eminent at the distance of nearly three centuries; must have contributed to excite in the boy's heart a devotion for her person and her cause. So situated, it must have been as difficult for a young and susceptible imagination not to aspire after civil dignities as for a boy bred in camps not to long to be a soldier. But the time for these was not yet come. For the present his field of ambition was still in the school-room and library; where perhaps from the delicacy of his constitution he was more at home than in the playground. His career there was victorious; new prospects of boundless extent opening on every side; till at length, just about the age at which an intellect of quick growth begins to be conscious of original power, he was sent to the University, where he hoped to learn all that men knew. By the time however that he had gone through the usual course and heard what the various professors had to say, he was conscious of a disappointment. It seemed that towards the end of the sixteenth century men neither knew nor aspired to know more than was to be learned from Aristotle; a strange thing at any time; more strange than ever just then, when the heavens themselves seemed to be taking up the argument on their own behalf,

1 He was nine years old when the Bull of Excommunication was published and the Rebellion in the North broke out.

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