of its chiefs a proof against the great traditional
system of the Church which Elizabeth was loath to part with, and which,
in spite of all its present and inevitable shortcomings, her political
sagacity taught her to reverence and trust.

At the age of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and put under Whitgift at
Trinity. It is a question which recurs continually to readers about
those times and their precocious boys, what boys were then? For whatever
was the learning of the universities, these boys took their place with
men and consorted with them, sharing such knowledge as men had, and
performing exercises and hearing lectures according to the standard of
men. Grotius at eleven was the pupil and companion of Scaliger and the
learned band of Leyden; at fourteen he was part of the company which
went with the ambassadors of the States-General to Henry IV.; at sixteen
he was called to the bar, he published an out-of-the-way Latin writer,
Martianus Capella, with a learned commentary, and he was the
correspondent of De Thou. When Bacon was hardly sixteen he was admitted
to the Society of "Ancients" of Gray's Inn, and he went in the household
of Sir Amyas Paulet, the Queen's Ambassador, to France. He thus spent
two years in France, not in Paris alone, but at Blois, Tours, and
Poitiers. If this was precocious, there is no indication that it was
thought precocious. It only meant that clever and promising boys were
earlier associated with men in important business than is customary now.
The old and the young heads began to work together sooner. Perhaps they
felt that there was less time to spare. In spite of instances of
longevity, life was shorter for the average of busy men, for the
conditions of life were worse.

Two recollections only have been preserved of his early years. One is
that, as he told his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, late in life, he had
discovered, as far back as his Cambridge days, the "unfruitfulness" of
Aristotle's method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is not
uncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text-books; it was the
fashion with clever men, as, for instance, Montaigne, to talk against
Aristotle without knowing anything about him; it is not uncommon for men
who have worked out a great idea to find traces of it, on precarious
grounds, in their boyish thinking. Still, it is worth noting that Bacon
himself believed that his fundamental quarrel with Aristotle had begun
with the first efforts of tho