Bacon | Page 3

consequence.
Francis Bacon was born in London on the 22d of January, 1560/61,
three years before Galileo. He was born at York House, in the Strand;
the house which, though it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had
been lately tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, in which
Bacon himself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, and which passed
after his fall into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who has left
his mark in the Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the
garden of the Thames Embankment. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon,
Elizabeth's first Lord Keeper, the fragment of whose effigy in the Crypt
of St. Paul's is one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire.
His uncle by marriage was that William Cecil who was to be Lord
Burghley. His mother, the sister of Lady Cecil, was one of the
daughters of Sir Antony Cook, a person deep in the confidence of the
reforming party, who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a
remarkable woman, highly accomplished after the fashion of the ladies
of her party, and as would become her father's daughter and the austere
and laborious family to which she belonged. She was "exquisitely
skilled in the Greek and Latin tongues;" she was passionately religious,
according to the uncompromising religion which the exiles had brought
back with them from Geneva, Strasburg, and Zurich, and which saw in
Calvin's theology a solution of all the difficulties, and in his discipline a
remedy for all the evils, of mankind. This means that his boyhood from
the first was passed among the high places of the world--at one of the
greatest crises of English history--in the very centre and focus of its
agitations. He was brought up among the chiefs and leaders of the
rising religion, in the houses of the greatest and most powerful persons
of the State, and naturally, as their child, at times in the Court of the
Queen, who joked with him, and called him "her young Lord Keeper."
It means also that the religious atmosphere in which he was brought up
was that of the nascent and aggressive Puritanism, which was not
satisfied with the compromises of the Elizabethan Reformation, and
which saw in the moral poverty and incapacity of many of its chiefs a

proof against the great traditional system of the Church which
Elizabeth was loath to part with, and which, in spite of all its present
and inevitable shortcomings, her political sagacity taught her to
reverence and trust.
At the age of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and put under Whitgift
at Trinity. It is a question which recurs continually to readers about
those times and their precocious boys, what boys were then? For
whatever was the learning of the universities, these boys took their
place with men and consorted with them, sharing such knowledge as
men had, and performing exercises and hearing lectures according to
the standard of men. Grotius at eleven was the pupil and companion of
Scaliger and the learned band of Leyden; at fourteen he was part of the
company which went with the ambassadors of the States-General to
Henry IV.; at sixteen he was called to the bar, he published an
out-of-the-way Latin writer, Martianus Capella, with a learned
commentary, and he was the correspondent of De Thou. When Bacon
was hardly sixteen he was admitted to the Society of "Ancients" of
Gray's Inn, and he went in the household of Sir Amyas Paulet, the
Queen's Ambassador, to France. He thus spent two years in France, not
in Paris alone, but at Blois, Tours, and Poitiers. If this was precocious,
there is no indication that it was thought precocious. It only meant that
clever and promising boys were earlier associated with men in
important business than is customary now. The old and the young
heads began to work together sooner. Perhaps they felt that there was
less time to spare. In spite of instances of longevity, life was shorter for
the average of busy men, for the conditions of life were worse.
Two recollections only have been preserved of his early years. One is
that, as he told his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, late in life, he had discovered,
as far back as his Cambridge days, the "unfruitfulness" of Aristotle's
method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is not uncommon for
undergraduates to criticise their text-books; it was the fashion with
clever men, as, for instance, Montaigne, to talk against Aristotle
without knowing anything about him; it is not uncommon for men who
have worked out a great idea to find traces of it, on precarious grounds,
in their boyish thinking. Still, it is worth noting that Bacon himself

believed that