BARON VERULAM, VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS, & LORD New Edition, with the Quotations translated. WARWICK: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY R. SPENNELL, 270. 1882. LIFE OF LORD BACON. FRANCIS BACON, the Father of Experimental Philosophy, was born in the opening of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at York House in the Strand, January 22nd, 1561. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, who for more than twenty years was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, was considered as ranking next to the great Burleigh as a statesman, and "belonged by nature to that order of men who always form the front ranks in the great intellectual progress." His mother, Sir Nicholas' second wife, and daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to Edward VI., was a lady of highly cultivated mind, distinguished both as a linguist and as a theologian. She corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewel, and translated his Apologia from the Latin so correctly that neither he nor Bishop Parker could suggest a single alteration. "She is also spoken of as a religious woman, full of affection and Puritanic fervour, and deeply interested in the condition of the Church. Francis was the youngest of eight children, and, as not unfrequently occurs with men of intellectual eminence, his health was very delicate. Of his early boyhood but little is known. If we mention that as a child he amused the Queen with his precocious gravity and readiness of speech, and that she playfully called him her young Lord Keeper, that we find him stealing away from his playfellows to a vault in Saint James's Fields to investigate the cause of a singular echo which he had observed there, and also endeavouring to penetrate the mystery of a juggler who performed in his father's house, we have all that is recorded of the first twelve or thirteen years of his life. In his thirteenth year he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, but after a residence of scarcely three years he left with profound contempt for the course of study pursued there. It has often been said that while at College, Bacon planned his great work the "Novum Organum," but this is by no means certain. Possibly, all that he did while |