tractors.

It is only in his maturity, indeed, that we are privileged to enter into
his mind and read his heart. But enough is known of the formative period
of his life to show us the sources of his weaknesses and of his
strength. The child whom high authorities have regarded as endowed with
the mightiest intellect of the human race was born at York House, on the
Strand, in the third year of Elizabeth's reign, January 22d, 1561. He
was the son of the Queen's Lord Keeper of the Seals, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
and his second wife Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Cook, formerly tutor
of King Edward VI. Mildred, an elder daughter of the same scholar, was
the wife of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who for the first forty years
of her reign was Elizabeth's chief minister. As a child Bacon was a
favorite at court, and tradition represents him as something of a pet of
the Queen, who called him "my young Lord Keeper." His mother was among
the most learned women of an age when, among women of rank, great
learning was as common and as highly prized as great beauty; and her
influence was a potent intellectual stimulus to the boy, although he
revolted in early youth from the narrow creed which her fierce Puritan
zeal strove to impose on her household. Outside of the nursery, the
atmosphere of his world was that of craft, all directed to one end; for
the Queen was the source of honor, power, and wealth, and advancement in
life meant only a share in the grace distributed through her ministers
and favorites. Apart from the harsh and forbidding religious teachings
of his mother, young Francis had before him neither precept nor example
of an ambition more worthy than that of courting the smiles of power.

[Illustration: SIR FRANCIS BACON.]

At the age of twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge (April,
1573), and left it before he was fifteen (Christmas, 1575); the
institution meanwhile having been broken up for more than half a year
(August, 1574, to March, 1575) by the plague, so that his intermittent
university career summed up less than fourteen months. There is no
record of his studies, and the names of his teachers are unknown; for
though Bacon in later years called himself a pupil of Whitgift, and his
biographers assumed that the relation was direct and personal, yet that
great master of Trinity had certainly ended his teaching days before
Bacon went to Cambridge, and had entered as Dean of Lincoln on his
splendid ecclesiastical care