nd pamphlets of his own time"--a
literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his fictitious
reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works would begin to use it
wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than
out of his teens and into his twenties.

At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years
there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English Ambassador,
and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and
the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years. A total of six
years spent at the sources of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of
men. The three spent at the university were coeval with the second and
last three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school
supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing to
infer from. The second three of the Baconian six were "presumably" spent
by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the thugs
presume it--on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way, when they
want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business purposes,
all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also know how
to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is
better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom
into a fact when _they_ have the handling of it. They know by old
experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not
going to _stay_ tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to
develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of _fact_, and make him
sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important and
insolent and come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity
with a thundering bellow that will convince everybody because it is so
loud. The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where
reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn't be a thug, not even if--but
never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the argument, and it is
not noble in spirit besides. If I am better than a thug, is the merit
mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the praise. That is the right
spirit.

They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the
Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also "presume"
that the butcher was his father. They don't know. There is no written
record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it w