heights of Camberwell and the hills of
Surrey.

Francis Bacon was born in York House in
the year fifteen hundred and sixty, and was,
as the boy when twelve years old cleverly
said to Queen Elizabeth, "just two years
younger than her Majesty's happy reign."
When he was four years old, his father, Sir
Nicholas, the lord keeper, endangered his
place by being concerned in the production
of Haille's book in favour of the Suffolk
succession to the throne. His mother is
mentioned by Strype as one of the learned ladies
who adorned their noble rank by their literary
acquirements in the age of Queen
Elizabeth. She was the author of a
translation from Latin to English of Bishop
Jewell's Apology. Francis was the youngest
son of five. In York House he enjoyed the
instructions of his father's chaplain, Mr.
Johnson, a Puritan, partial to logical studies,
and who doubtless infused into the mind of
the pupil, the Protestant spirit of free and
independent thought. When his pupil was at
Cambridge, Mr. Johnson died of cold, famine,
and foul air, in prison, solitary, unfriended,
and refused charitable relief for marrying
without using the ring, and for omitting the
sign of the cross and the consecration of every
supply of the sacramental wine. Poor Johnson
had not been able to infuse into any of
the Bacons any portion of his own rigid
conscientiousness; else, probably, his fate and
their lots in life would have been very
different. He does not seem to have known
how to temper the spirit of the German
Luther with the policy of the Italian
Machiavel. The intellect of Bacon took a scientific
turn in his earliest boyhood. When his
companions were playing in St. James's Park,
he would steal away from them to the brick
conduit to try to discover the cause of a
singular echo. Probably the sagacity of his
father encouraged these scientific investigations,
to prevent his mind from swerving
from the path of legal ambition under the
ecclesiastical and theological influences of his
tutor and of his mother. Strype, in his Life
of Archbishop Parker, mentions a pleasing
anecdote of Lady Bacon. Her translation of
Bishop Jewell's Apology for the Church of
England was finished when her youngest boy
was four years old. Desirous of the opinion
of Archbishop Parker, she sent the
manuscript to him, and only a short time elapsed
before the work was returned to her in print
without the alteration of a word or a letter,
and accompanied with an epistle of applause
and thanks. Strype says this conduct was
all the more handsome, as the Archbishop
was himself the unknown author of a translation
published anonymously only a couple
of years previously. The infancy of Francis
Bacon in fifteen hundred and sixty-four
witnessed the literary success of his mother.
Perhaps his father's connection with Haille's
book about this time was not entirely hidden
from him. Upwards of half a century
elapses, the child is a grey-haired man,
holding his father's office, and occupying the
official residence in which he was born, and
the apartments are crowded with everybody
distinguished for rank, power, or learning in
London, who had assembled together to
congratulate the Lord Chancellor on the
publication of his Novum Organon.

Number One, Gray's Inn Square, was the
residence of Francis Bacon during his youth,
his manhood, and after his fall. In this
house he wrote most of his great works. The
five sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon became
members of Gray's Inn on the twenty-first of
November, fifteen hundred and seventy-six,
and their names are entered in succession as
Nicholas, Nathaniel, Edward, Anthony, and
Francis. Francis was in his seventeenth
year. He had left Cambridge, where his
mind revolted against the scholastic logic as
taught by Archbishop Whitgift, and
marvelled respecting the laws of sound by which
an iron pillar in Trinity College made a little
flat noise in the room where it was struck,
but a great bomb in the chamber beneath.
He was just about to proceed to Paris to
the observe continental manners in the residence
  of the English ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet.
He shared the splendours of the embassy for
about two years. Being in Paris, and his
father dying in London, two or three days
before the death of his father he dreamt that
his father's country house at Gorhambury
was plastered all over with black mortar. The
death of his father transferred Mr. Francis
Bacon, at the age of nineteen, from the
  gaieties of the Embassy at Paris to "streits
and necessities" in his lodgings at Gray's Inn.
His father had a sum of money by him which
he intended to lay out for the benefit of his
two youngest sons, Anthony and Francis, the
offspring of his second marriage. The
suddenness of his death frustrated his intention,
and the sum was divided equally among all
the five sons. Hence the "streits and
necessities."

Several years ago, when making my ghost
of Bacon, I made a pilgrimage to his
residence in Gray's Inn. I asked a messenger,
whose business consists in delivering letters
and going errands for the gentlemen of the
Inn, if he knew the house in which the great
Lord Bacon lived? He stared with surprise:
"Lord Bacon! Lord Bacon! he don't live
here. I never heard of him, sir." The arms
of Lord Bacon adorned the painted glass of
the window behind this man's back, and his
residence was before his face. At last he
exclaimed: "Perhaps the porter can tell
you, sir." The porter "did not know where
Lord Bacon had lived, but he knew it was
somewhere in the square, and he knew Sir
Gerard Noel lived with him, wherever it
was." With this information, the little man
decisively shut his little half-door. In Number
One there is a controversy between the