desk put up in his study, that his stockings were dyed at a cost of 12d., that his laundress's bill from Midsummer to Michaelmas was 3 shillings, that his hose were mended, his windows glazed, two dozen silk points, a pair of pantofles and pumps bought for him, and a dozen new buttons set on his doublet. Some books the brothers brought with them from London. With others they were furnished by the Master, as Livy, Cicero, Demosthenes' Olynthiacs, Homer's Iliad, Cæsar, Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Sallust, and Hermogenes. There is an interval in the accounts from the latter part of August, 1574, to the 21st of March following; during which time the plague raged in Cambridge, and the members of the University were dispersed. The only record of Bacon's residence at Trinity is a reminiscence of his own preserved in the Sylva Sylvarum (cent. ii. 151), which shows that at this early period he had begun to observe natural phenomena. "I remember,' he says, 'in Trinity College in Cambridge, there was an upper chamber, which being thought weak in the roof of it, was supported by a pillar of iron, of the bigness of one's arm, in the midst of the chamber; which if you had struck, it would make a little flat noise in the room where it was struck, but it would make a great bomb in the chamber beneath.' We may possibly have here a description of the rooms occupied by the two brothers, but if so they must have been in the buildings of King's Hall, removed by Dr. Nevill in constructing the present Old Court. No tradition of their whereabouts remains. If we add to these fragments an anecdote related by Dr. Rawley, his chaplain and earliest biographer, we are in possession of all that is known of Francis Bacon up to the time that he completed his fifteenth year. Rawley's story introduces us to a child of singular gravity and adroitness, the future Chancellor and courtier. The Queen 'delighted much then to confer with him, and to prove him with questions; unto whom he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his years, that Her Majesty would often term him "The young Lord Keeper." Being asked by the Queen how old he was, he answered with much discretion, being then but a boy, "That he was two years younger than Her Majesty's happy reign;" with which answer the Queen was much taken.' Another anecdote from the same source, of which more than enough has been made, belongs to this period. 'Whilst he was commorant in the University, about sixteen years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day.' The story which has been told above of the iron pillar in the chamber at Trinity shows that Bacon's attention had been very early directed to the observation of sounds, and lends a probability to the supposition that it may have been at this time that he tried the experiment recorded in the Sylva Sylvarum (cent. ii. 140). 'There is in St. James's Fields a conduit of brick, unto which joineth a low vault; and at the end of that a round house of stone; and in the brick conduit there is a window; and in the round-house a slit or rift of some little breadth; if you cry out in the rift, it will make a fearful roaring at the window.' In all this there is a certain ring of boyishness. To this time also belongs the story of the conjuror (Sylva, cent. x. 946), who must have exhibited his tricks at Sir Nicholas Bacon's house before Francis left England. But his father had in view for him a public career as statesman or diplomatist, and after he had spent nearly three years over his books at Cambridge, sent him to France to read men. On the 25th of September, 1576, we learn from Burghley's diary, 'Sir Amyas Paulet landed at Calliss going to be Amb. at France in Place of Dr. Dale.' It was not till the February following that he succeeded to the post. Bacon apparently joined him after his arrival in Paris, for on Nov. 21, 1576, he was admitted of the grand company at Gray's Inn, having entered the Society on the 27th of June previous. He was subsequently 'entrusted with some message or advertisement to the Queen; which having performed with great approbation, he returned back into France again, with intention to continue for some years there.' (Rawley.) Here we find him still keen in his observation of natural phenomena, sounds as before occupying a great share of his attention. Let him describe what he heard in his own words written nearly fifty years later. For echoes upon echoes, there is a rare instance thereof in a place which I will now exactly describe. It is some three or four miles from Paris, near a town called Pont-Charenton; and some bird-bolt shot or more from the river of Seine. The room is a chapel or small church. The walls all standing, both at the sides and at the ends. Two rows of pillars, after the manner of aisles of churches, also standing; the roof all open, not so much as any embowment near any of the walls left. There was against every pillar a stack of billets above a man's height; which the watermen that bring wood down the Seine in stacks, and not in boats, laid there (as it seemeth) for their ease. Speaking at the one end, I did hear it return the voice thirteen several times: and I have heard of others, that it would return sixteen times: for I was there about three of the clock in the afternoon; and it is best (as all other echoes are) in the evening..... I remember well, that when I went to the echo at Pont-Charenton, there was an old Parisian, who took it to be the work of spirits, and of good spirits. For (said he) call Satan, and the echo will not deliver back the devil's name; but will say, va t'en; which is as much in French as apage or avoid. And thereby I did hap to find that an echo would not return S, being but a hissing and an interior sound.' (Sylva Sylvarum, cent. iii. 249, 251.) Another story which he tells of himself belongs to this period of his life. ‘I had, from my childhood, a wart upon one of my fingers: afterwards, when I was about sixteen years old, being then at Paris, there grew upon both my hands a number of warts (at the least an hundred) in a month's space. The English ambassador's lady, who was a woman far from superstition, told me one day, she would help me away with my warts: whereupon she got a piece of lard, with the skin on, and rubbed the warts all over with the fat side; and amongst the rest, that wart which "I had had from my childhood: then she nailed the piece of lard, with the fat towards the sun, upon a post of her chamber window, which was to the south. The success was, that within five weeks' space all the warts went quite away: and that wart which I had so long endured, for company.' (Sylva Sylvarum, cent. x. 997.) The questions of sounds and mysterious sympathies did not, however, occupy the whole of his active mind. It was while at Paris learning diplomacy that he invented the cypher which he describes at the end of the sixth book of the De Augmentis, and here too he probably saw that strange visionary, Guillaume Postell, in his retreat at the monastery of St. Martin des Champs. In the summer of 1577, the French Court was at Poitiers. Sir Amias Paulet, with Bacon probably in his suite, remained there from the end of July to the latter end of October. That Bacon was at Poitiers at some time during his residence in France we know from his own account of a conversation with a cynical young Frenchman, perhaps a student, who afterwards became a man of considerable distinction. (Hist. Vitæ et Mortis, Works, ii. 211.) There is no evidence however that he himself studied at the University there. But now an event occurred which changed the whole current of his life. On the 20th of February, 1578–9, Sir Nicholas Bacon died, after an illness of only a few days. His death, by a strange coincidence, was foreshadowed by a dream, which his son upon after reflection appears to have regarded almost as a sign of the coming disaster. 'I myself remember,' he says, 'that being in Paris, and my father dying in London, two or three days before my father's death I had a dream, which I told to divers English gentlemen, that my father's house in the country was plastered all over with black mortar.' (Sylva, cent. x. 986.) A month later, on the 20th of March, 1578-9, Bacon left Paris, bearing with him a despatch and commendations from Sir Amias Paulet to the Queen. His father, according to Rawley, had accumulated a considerable sum of money for the purpose of purchasing an estate for his youngest son, but his sudden death prevented its accomplishment, and Francis was left with only a fifth part of his father's personal property. Diplomacy was now abandoned as a career, his prospects of a studious leisure became more distant than ever, and for one who would willingly have lived only to study, there was nothing left but to study how to live a. Soon after his return to England he appears to have entered upon a course of law at Gray's Inn, and on the 27th of June, 1582, we find him admitted as an utter barrister. The next year he is seen abroad in the city in his barrister's dress, and promises to do well. Meanwhile he has made a beginning of the great work on which his fame was to rest, the first sketch of which he called, as he told Father Fulgentio forty years later, by the ambitious title of Temporis Partus Maximus. In 1584 Bacon appeared upon a new stage, which he never left for thirty years and upwards, and on which some of his greatest triumphs were achieved. On the 23rd of November he took his seat in the House of Commons as member for Melcombe Regis, in Dorsetshire. In D'Ewes's Journal (p. 337), his name appears on the Committee appointed on the 9th of December to consider the 'Bill for redress of Disorders in Common Informers.' In the next Parliament, which met Oct. 29, 1586, he sat for Taunton, and on the 4th of November made a speech on 'the great cause' of Mary, Queen of Scots, but no report of it has been preserved. With other members of both Houses he attended (Nov. 12) upon the a Of his personal appearance at this time we can form an idea from the interesting picture painted by Hilliard in 1578, with the significant motto, showing that his intellectual pre-eminence was already becoming conspicuous, Si tabula daretur digna, animum mallem. The artist is he of whom Donne says: A hand or eye By Hilliard drawn, is worth a history |