x PREFACE. 
father, according to Rawley, had accumulated a considerable 
sum of money for the purpose of purchasing an estate for his 
youngest son, but his sudden death prevented its accomplish- 
ment, and Francis was left with only a fifth part of his father’s 
personal property. Diplomacy was now abandoned as a career, 
his prospects of a studious leisure became more distant than 
ever, and for one who would willingly have lived only to study, 
there was nothing left but to study how to live®. Soon after 
his return to England he appears to have entered upon a 
course of law at Gray’s Inn, and on the 27th of June, 1582, 
we find him admitted as an utter barrister. The next year 
he is seen abroad in the city in his barrister’s dress, and pro- 
mises to do well. Meanwhile he has made a beginning of 
the great work on which his fame was to rest, the first sketch 
of which he called, as he told Father Fulgentio forty years 
later, by the ambitious title of Temporis Partus Maximus. 
In 1584 Bacon appeared upon a new stage, which he never 
jeft for thirty years and upwards, and on which some of his 
greatest triumphs were achieved. On the 23rd of November 
he took his seat in the House of Commons as member for 
Melcombe Regis, in Dorsetshire. In D’Ewes’s Journal (p. 337), 
his name appears on the Committee appointed on the gth of 
December to consider the ‘ Bill for redress of Disorders in 
Common Informers.’ In the next Parliament, which met 
Oct. 29, 1586, he sat for Taunton, and on the 4th of No- 
vember made a speech on ‘the great cause’ of Mary, Queen 
of Scots, but no report of it has been preserved. With other 
members of both Houses he attended (Nov. 12) upon the 
@ Of his personal appearance at this time we can form an idea from 
the interesting picture painted by Hilliard in 1578, with the significant 
motto, showing that his intellectual pre-eminence was already becoming 
conspicuous, Si tabula daretur digna, animum mallem. ‘The artist is he 
of whom Donne says :— 
‘A hand or eye 
By Hilliard drawn, is worth a history 
By a worse painter made,’ 
