It is only in his maturity, indeed, that we are privileged to enter into his mind and read his heart.  But enough is known of the formative period of his life to show us the sources of his weaknesses and of his strength.  The child whom high authorities have regarded as endowed with the mightiest intellect of the human race was born at York House, on the Strand, in the third year of Elizabeth’s reign, January 22d, 1561.  He was the son of the Queen’s Lord Keeper of the Seals, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and his second wife Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Cook, formerly tutor of King Edward VI.  Mildred, an elder daughter of the same scholar, was the wife of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who for the first forty years of her reign was Elizabeth’s chief minister.  As a child Bacon was a favorite at court, and tradition represents him as something of a pet of the Queen, who called him “my young Lord Keeper.”  His mother was among the most learned women of an age when, among women of rank, great learning was as common and as highly prized as great beauty; and her influence was a potent intellectual stimulus to the boy, although he revolted in early youth from the narrow creed which her fierce Puritan zeal strove to impose on her household.  Outside of the nursery, the atmosphere of his world was that of craft, all directed to one end; for the Queen was the source of honor, power, and wealth, and advancement in life meant only a share in the grace distributed through her ministers and favorites.  Apart from the harsh and forbidding religious teachings of his mother, young Francis had before him neither precept nor example of an ambition more worthy than that of courting the smiles of power.

[Illustration:  SIR FRANCIS BACON.]

At the age of twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge (April, 1573), and left it before he was fifteen (Christmas, 1575); the institution meanwhile having been broken up for more than half a year (August, 1574, to March, 1575) by the plague, so that his intermittent university career summed up less than fourteen months.  There is no record of his studies, and the names of his teachers are unknown; for though Bacon in later years called himself a pupil of Whitgift, and his biographers assumed that the relation was direct and personal, yet that great master of Trinity had certainly ended his teaching days before Bacon went to Cambridge, and had entered as Dean of Lincoln on his splendid ecclesiastical career.  University life was very different from that of our times.  The statutes of Cambridge forbade a student, under penalties, to use in conversation with another any language but Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, unless in his private apartments and in hours of leisure.  It was a regular custom at Trinity to bring before the assembled undergraduates every Thursday evening at seven o’clock such junior students as had been detected in breaches of the rules during the week, and to flog them.  It would be interesting to know in what languages