II. 4.

1579.

1580.

when they are forty years old, and filled with all knowledge of men and books, she not only sends them game from her own larder and strong beer from her own casks, having no great faith in other people's work, but lectures them on what they shall eat and drink, when they shall purge or let blood, how far they may ride or walk or drive in a coach, when they may safely eat supper, and at what hour in the morning they shall rise from bed.

4. Lady Ann lives at Gorhambury. Anthony is abroad, now in France, now in Italy, now in Navarre, conning the languages and manners, the politics and events, of these famous lands. Francis falls to his terms at Gray's Inn, seeks the help of his great kinsman Burghley, and finds a seat in the House of Commons for himself at the age of twenty-four.

A letter, now first put in type, will show that he has July 11. fixed his tent at Gray's Inn as early as the summer of 1580, a few months after his nineteenth year. This note is curious as the earliest known piece of writing from his hand, and as a sample of his boyish style. Macaulay dwells on the change from his early to his later manner; the statuesque severity of that of his youth compared against the glow, the imagery, the wit, the licence, and the colour of that of his later time. At twenty Mino, at forty he had grown into Raffaelle. How grave, how cold this message to Mr. Wylie!

MR. WYLIE,

BACON TO MR. WYLIE.

From Gray's Inn, 11 of July, 1580. This very afternoon, giving date to these letters of mine, I received yours by the hands of Mr. Wimbanke,

4. Gray's Inn Reg., cited in Craik's Bacon, i. 12; Bacon to Wylie, July 11, 1580, in Lambeth MSS. 647, fol. 14.

and to the which I thought convenient not only to make answer, but also therein to make speed, lest, upon supposition that the two letters enclosed were, according to their directions, delivered, you should commit any error, either in withholding your letters so much the longer when peradventure they mought be looked for, or in not withholding to make mention of these former letters in any other of a latter despatch. The considerations that moved me to stay the letters from receipt, whether they be in respect that I take this course to be needless or insufficient or likely to lead to more inconvenience otherwise than to do good, as it is meant in some such, they are that they prevail with my simple discretion, which you have put in trust in ordering the matter to persuade me to do as I have done.

My trust and desire likewise is that you will report (?) and satisfy yourself upon that which seemeth good to me herein, being most privy to the circumstances of the matter, and tendering my brother's orders as I ought, and not being misaffected to you neither, by those at whom you glance, while I know whom you mean. I know likewise that you mean amiss; for I am able, upon knowledge, to acquit them from being toward [in ?] this matter. For mine own part, truly, Mr. Wylie, I never took it that your joining in company and travel with my brother proceeded not only of good will in you, but also of his motion, and that your mind was always rather by desert than pretence of friendship to earn thanks than to win them. Neither would I say this much to you, if I would shrink to say it in any place where the contrary was inferred and in that I rectified my brother of this matter being delivered unto me for truth. I had this consideration that among friends more advertisements are profitable than true. My

C

II. 4.

1580.

July.

1580.

July.

II. 4. request to you is, that you will continue and proceed in your good mind towards my brother's well-doing; and although he himself can best both judge and consider of it, yet I dare say withall that his friends will not be unthankful to misconstrue it, but ready to acknowledge it upon. his liking. And as for this matter, as you take no knowledge at all of it, I will undertake it upon my knowledge that it shall be the better choice. Thus betake I you to the Lord.

Your very friend,

FR. BACON.

1585.

Though he enters the House of Commons, he finds no Nov. 23. public work. Not that Burghley pets and lures him only to chain him fast; the great Protestant minister is a man too high and noble for such a part, nor can Englishmen afford to soil his fame. Bacon, at least, never dreams that his uncle plays him false. That he does not push him with all his might is true: but this may be, not because he dreads in him a rival to his son, as is often said, so much as because, being old and timid, fearful of adventure and speculation, of risking those measures of Religion and State in which his name is for ever bound up, he dreads the daring and original genius of his nephew, apt, he may think, in his flush of youth and intellectual strength to dash at success, to fly at the nearest road, to bridle and ride the popular storm.

5. Rawley, Mallet, Montagu, and Lord Campbell have in turn slurred the ten or twelve years in which Bacon grows from a boy of nineteen into a man of thirty or thirty-one, though in drama and instruction these years.

5. Willis, Notitia Parliamentaria, iii. 101, 113, 121; D'Ewes, 337.

RETURNED FOR MIDDLESEX.

19

hold rank among the noblest of his life. The writers set him high on the stage for the first time in 1592, when he is thirty-one. "In the parliaments which met in 1586 and 1588," says Lord Campbell," he had been returned to the House of Commons; but he does not seem to have made himself prominent by taking any decided part for or against the Crown."

What is the truth? In 1592 he is returned to parliament for Middlesex, the most wealthy, liberal, independent shire in England-the West Riding of the time and of long succeeding times. He is young, poor, out of place. He is even out of favour, since his uncle has turned from the young reformer his powerful face. Having neither rood of land nor hope of inheritance within the shire, the squires and freeholders of Middlesex choose him. Why, and how? Did penniless genius ever start in life by winning the first constituency in the realm? Burke wooed the electors of Wendover before he dreamt of Bristol. Pitt began with Appleby, and only at his height of power won the University of Cambridge. Brougham suffered defeat at Liverpool, and was glad to sit for Knaresborough, ere he tried to conquer the West Riding. So with Bacon. Service and success, of which the writers have never heard, lifted him to the height of Middlesex. When he rose at Brentford in 1592, he spoke to freeholders who knew his name and voice, not only as one of the most youthful, but as one of the most daring and effective members of a former House.

Bacon indeed served in Parliament prior even to the sessions of 1586 and 1588. He entered the House of Commons in 1585, when he was only twenty-four. He then sat for Melcombe. In the Parliament of 1586 he sat for Taunton, and in that of 1588 for Liverpool.

II. 5.

1585.

Nov.

II. 6.

1585. Nov.

6. These three sessions not stirring! The author of Tom Jones has a passage on the advantage of a writer knowing his subject; the great humourist should have told us of the ease and comfort which a writer finds in not knowing his subject. Will not his soul be more at peace? No truth will curb the freedom of his judgment— no fact interrupt the flow of his style. See how Hallam hesitates and halts! He knows too much. Only your blind horse will leap into the chasm, or wait his death-gore from the horn of a bull.

A month at books on any subject will not weight one much. A diplomatist used to say that when he had been four weeks in London he felt able to write a book on English life; when he had been a year, he had doubts if he yet understood the whole of his theme; when he had been ten years, he gave up the book in despair.

Not stirring! Why, the three sessions in which Bacon serves his parliamentary apprenticeship, though slipped as void and waste by his biographers, abound in scenes of high and tragic conflict-scenes in which he plays an active and conspicuous part, and which colour and shape for him the course of his political life. These three sessions have to save the liberties of England, the faith of nearly half of Europe. They crush the Jesuits, they found the Defence Association, they send out Raleigh to plant new States, they lay Mary on the bier at Fotheringay, they break and punish the Romanist conspiracies, they shatter and disperse the Invincible Armada!

7. Nor are these early Parliaments less bright in composition than brave in deed. On swearing the oaths

6. D'Ewes, 332, 439; Townshend, i. 29.

7. Not. Parl., iii. 99, 107; Bacon's Essays, No. 3.