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PREFACE.

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[1]. 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

  1. ↑ 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
    By a worse painter made.’

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