32 CHAPTER II. BACON'S LIFE TO THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH. 1561-1603. FRANCIS BACON,-second1 son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth, and Ann Cooke (daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke), whose sister Mildred became the wife of Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley,-was born on the 22d of January 1561,2 in his father's residence, York House, London, and died April 9, 1626, in the house of Lord Arundel, near Highgate. Almost an exact contemporary of Galileo and Shakespeare, he was the junior by twenty-eight years of Montaigne, by eight of Spenser and Raleigh, the senior by twenty-seven of Hobbes, by thirty-five of Descartes. Copernicus lived nearly a century before him; Leibnitz and Newton flourished nearly a century later. His life fills the whole period known in the world of letters as the Elizabethan Age. In literature he remains 1 I.e., the youngest of eight children of Sir Nicholas, six being by a former marriage. 2 The year then began with March, so the old date would have. been 1560; but I adopt throughout the now current chronology. the chief of English essayists; in design he takes a high rank among law reformers; as a philosopher, he did more than any of his predecessors to popularise those inquiries into Nature now recognised as the distinctive feature of modern research; as a logician, he was the first to apply, though with imperfect success, a rigid method to the investigation of physical phenomena. An adequate account of his career would involve a review of almost the whole history of England during the last ten years of the sixteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In our space, we can do little more than note the stages and suggest conclusions regarding the most disputed passages of his life; passages which have been the theme of discussions almost as keen as those still engaged with the character of Mary Stuart. The first twenty years of Bacon's life are nearly a blank to us. We know that he spent his boyhood between the family residence, situated near the present Strand and the Thames, in London, and the countryseat at Gorhambury in Hertfordshire. In his twelfth year (April 1573) he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his tutor was Dean Whitgift, afterwards Archbishop and the champion of the Established Church against Cartwright. He left the University at Christmas 1575, having at the boyish age of fifteen acquired a reputation for precocious learning, and; during his brief residence, already conceived a dislike to the prevailing system of education in the worship of Aristotle," not," says Rawley his chaplain and first biographer, "for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of his way." Early in 1576, he P.-XIII. с was admitted, along with his elder brother Anthony (both being naturally destined for the bar), to the Society of Gray's Inn; and there shortly afterwards erected the lodgings which he continued through his life at frequent intervals to inhabit. In the following autumn he went abroad with Sir Amyas Paulet and passed three years as a member of the ambassador's household between Paris, Blois, Poitiers, and Tours, a period which we can only conjecture to have abounded in fruitful experiences. Mr Spedding's idea that Bacon was sent to France by his father that he might become familiar with the seamy sides of Continental policy, seems fanciful; but we may believe that he found more matter for warning than example in the recent memories of St Bartholomew, the intrigues of the Court of the last Valois, and the plots for marrying Don John of Austria to Mary of Scotland. During part of his sojourn, if we may trust an allusion in the 'De Augmentis,' the embryo student of foreign affairs was engaged in planning a new system of ciphers, a method much in demand in the course of an often tortuous diplomacy. Two definite anecdotes of his sojourn are worth recording. In 1578, when Bacon was at Paris, the painter Hilliard made a miniature of him, and inscribed beneath it: "Si tabula daretur digna, animum mallem," -a remarkable testimony to the conversational powers evinced by a youth of eighteen. The second incident appears in the 'Sylva Sylvarum,' in the midst of the half-credulous, half-critical discussion of presentiments, where he tells us that, in February 1579, he dreamt that his father's house in the country had been plastered over with black mortar; and it so happened that two Return from Abroad. 35 or three days later Sir Nicholas,1 falling asleep after being shaved, in bleak weather by an open window, caught cold and died. This event led to Bacon's speedy return to England. Having inherited a small share of fortune, he began to devote himself in earnest to the study of law, residing for the most part at his Inn of Court, of which he was, June 1582, admitted to be an utter barrister, and initiating in the second and third of his extant letters, addressed to his aunt, Lady Burghley, the long list of incessant and importunate appeals for countenance, help, and promotion, which only closed with his death. During those early years we have glimpses of the future Chancellor beginning his apprenticeship as a courtier, by answering to the Queen, when asked his age, "Only two years younger than your Majesty's happy reign;" and being saluted in return as "my young Lord Keeper." But stars adverse to the Cassiopoeia of his freshmanship intervened, and his suit to the Cecils and to Walsingham only procured an early admission to the Reader's table, and afterwards to the Bench of his Inn. From first to last Bacon failed to understand that patrons are apt to distrust, if they do not dislike, those who cannot cease from troubling. 1 Sir Nicholas, whose death may have retarded his son's advancement, though hardly to the extent assumed by Dean Church, seems to have been a fair rather than a great lawyer, a man of genial impulse, free generosity, and apt jest. Bacon's mental inheritance from his parents appears nearly to have reversed that of Goethe's, conveyed in the familiar lines: "Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes Führen; He The premonitions of the future author of the Instauratio' lisping in philosophy, and forming at the age of fifteen the first scheme of the Novum Organum,' are in like manner mere broken lights. The first distinct record of an ambition which, as is often the case with genius, almost partook of insolence, appears in the short Latin tractate, under the magniloquent title, 'The Greatest Birth of Time.'1 If this was written, as accepting a reference in 1625 we must suppose, in 1585, it dates with the author's entry into public life. sat in the Commons of 1584 for Melcombe Regis, and assumed the attitude he always, with modifications, steadfastly in the main preserved, that of a moderate reformer in secular matters, in religious an advocate of modified tolerance to both extremes-Puritan and Romanist-on either side of the "Via Media." Doubtless he leant more to the former at the beginning than towards the close of his career: the change may be accounted for by the waning influence of family ties, the increasingly difficult demands of the Nonconformists, and Bacon's own, sincere as well as politic, increasing attachment to the Court. His mother, one of the women whose scholarship and accomplishments still add to the lustre of her age, not only stimulated, but at first helped to direct, the energies of her son. Her character is sufficiently displayed in the anxious letters despatched from Gorhambury to Gray's Inn; where Latin and Greek quotations and fervent expressions of a zeal, that ere her death became a mania, appear side by side with plain 1 V. inf., vol. ii. chap. i., for a consideration of the question how far this Temporis Partus Maximus' is represented in Bacon's published writings by the fragmentary Temporis Partus Masculus.' |