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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 syypathies 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