ease man, and not to follow what his soul
must have told him was the better way. He wanted, in his dealings with
men, that sincerity on which he insisted so strongly in his dealings
with nature and knowledge. And the ruin of a great life was the
consequence.

Francis Bacon was born in London on the 22d of January, 1560/61, three
years before Galileo. He was born at York House, in the Strand; the
house which, though it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had been
lately tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, in which Bacon
himself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, and which passed after his
fall into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark in
the Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the garden of
the Thames Embankment. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's
first Lord Keeper, the fragment of whose effigy in the Crypt of St.
Paul's is one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire.
His uncle by marriage was that William Cecil who was to be Lord
Burghley. His mother, the sister of Lady Cecil, was one of the daughters
of Sir Antony Cook, a person deep in the confidence of the reforming
party, who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a remarkable woman,
highly accomplished after the fashion of the ladies of her party, and as
would become her father's daughter and the austere and laborious family
to which she belonged. She was "exquisitely skilled in the Greek and
Latin tongues;" she was passionately religious, according to the
uncompromising religion which the exiles had brought back with them from
Geneva, Strasburg, and Zurich, and which saw in Calvin's theology a
solution of all the difficulties, and in his discipline a remedy for all
the evils, of mankind. This means that his boyhood from the first was
passed among the high places of the world--at one of the greatest crises
of English history--in the very centre and focus of its agitations. He
was brought up among the chiefs and leaders of the rising religion, in
the houses of the greatest and most powerful persons of the State, and
naturally, as their child, at times in the Court of the Queen, who joked
with him, and called him "her young Lord Keeper." It means also that the
religious atmosphere in which he was brought up was that of the nascent
and aggressive Puritanism, which was not satisfied with the compromises
of the Elizabethan Reformation, and which saw in the moral poverty and
incapacity of many