Keats and Cowper and Tennyson and Ben Jonson and Thomson and Evelyn and Dryden also walked in Bacon's garden, and last, but not least, Sir Walter Scott was there showing his friend, Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, about.

To insure absolute clearness, all titles of books, both English and Latin, have been cited in full. Abbreviations, especially Latin abbreviations, are more misunderstood and so more disregarded than is generally supposed. Elizabethan titles are given in Elizabethan spelling, and in general in the older literature the older spellings have been preserved.

Finally, the notes explain briefly Bacon's historical allusions. All references, whether to Bacon's reading in writing the Essays, or to my own in editing them, have been personally verified.

MARY AUGUSTA SCOTT.

NORTHAMPTON, MASS.,

:

INTRODUCTION

I

FRANCIS BACON

FRANCIS BACON was born January 22, 1561, at York House, in the Strand, London, the youngest of the eight children of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Sir Nicholas Bacon, a stanch Protestant and a good lawyer, was one of that remarkable group of able men the young Queen Elizabeth gathered around her upon her accession to the throne, in 1558. Of her Lord Keeper, William Camden says, "She relied on him as the very oracle of the law."

Sir Nicholas Bacon was twice married; first, to Jane Fernely, daughter of William Fernely, of West Creting, Suffolk, who died leaving three sons and three daughters, and second, to Anne Cooke, second daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Gidea Hall, Essex. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon was the mother of Anthony and Francis Bacon. Coming into the world the son of a Lord Keeper, in York House, which he was himself to occupy as Lord Keeper in after years, Francis Bacon was as truly born to commanding position in life as is a king's

son. Many of his kinsmen held distinguished positions and filled them with credit to themselves and the nation. Lady Bacon was left a widow as a comparatively young woman, so that we naturally hear more of her family in the history of her famous son, than of his half-brothers and half-sisters, who were considerably older. But what has come down to us of his relations with these elder Bacons helps materially to reconstruct his environment.

The Elizabethans were great builders. The Wars of the Roses ended forever in England the necessity of building for protection from hostile neighbors, and the policy of internal peace fostered by the Tudors enabled Englishmen to accumulate wealth. Landholders under Queen Elizabeth could afford to build beautiful homes, and they liked to surround themselves with the new luxuries brought to their notice in England by the travellers, especially by the travellers in France and Italy. In domestic architecture, two of these luxuries were glass windows, which often fill up the side of a room in an Elizabethan house, and spacious gardens encircling the entire building and adorned with all sorts of devices, some original and some more or less crudely adapted from formal gardens abroad. Sir Nicholas Bacon, though not a rich man, built two houses. Redgrave, Guilford, Suffolk, where he had married his first wife, was without gardens, and so limited in size that Queen Elizabeth visiting her Lord Keeper there told him his house was too small. "No, Madam,” replied Sir Nicholas, "my house is not too small for me, but your Majesty has made me

too great for my house." Gorhambury, near St. Albans, was a larger house. About Gorhambury, says Edmund Lodge, in his Portrait of Sir Nicholas Bacon, he added "gardens of great extent, in the contrivance and decoration of which every feature of the bad taste of his time was abundantly lavished." Gorhambury was left to Lady Anne Bacon, and ultimately became the property and the country home of Francis Bacon.

The mansion of Redgrave was inherited by Sir Nicholas Bacon, 2d, who was doubtless hard pressed to support there his family of nine sons and three daughters. Nathaniel Bacon, second of the elder sons, is described as of Stiffkey, Norfolk. He was something of an artist. Playing upon the name and domestic habits of his stepmother, Anne Cooke Bacon, he made a portrait of her, now at Gorhambury, dressed as a cook and standing in a litter of dead game. The third elder brother, Edward Bacon, obtained from Queen Elizabeth, in 1574, a lease of Twickenham Park, on the Thames fronting the royal palace at Richmond. Francis Bacon's letters as a young man are often dated from Twickenham Park, showing that he lived from time to time at his half-brother's country seat.

In 1597, when Bacon was elected to Parliament for Ipswich, the family county town, he had as colleagues no less than six kinsmen. His brother Anthony sat for Oxford; his half-brother, Nathaniel, for Lynn; his cousin, Sir Edward Hoby, for Rochester; his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, for Herts; while Henry Neville, who represented Liskeard,