PREFACE. ix 
she would help me away with my warts: whereupon she got 
a piece of lard, with the skin on, and rubbed the warts all 
' over with the fat side; and amongst the rest, that wart which 
I had had from my childhood: then she nailed the piece of 
lard, with the fat towards the sun, upon a post of her chamber 
window, which was to the south. The success was, that 
within five weeks’ space all the warts went quite away: and 
_ that wart which I had so long endured, for company.’ (Sylva 
Sylvarum, cent. x. 997.) The questions of sounds and mys- 
terious sympathies did not, however, occupy the whole of his 
active mind. It was while at Paris learning diplomacy that 
he invented the cypher which he describes at the end of the 
sixth book of the De Augmentis, and here too he probably 
saw that strange visionary, Guillaume Postell, in his retreat 
at the monastery of St. Martin des Champs. In the summer 
of 1577, the French Court was at Poitiers. Sir Amias Paulet, 
with Bacon probably in his suite, remained there from the end 
of July to the latter end of October. That Bacon was at 
Poitiers at some time during his residence in France we 
know from his own account of a conversation with a cynical 
young Frenchman, perhaps a student, who afterwards became 
a man of considerable distinction. (Hist. Vite et Mortis, 
Works, ii. 211.) There is no evidence however that he him- 
self studied at the University there. 
But now an event occurred which changed the whole cur- 
rent of his life. On the 2oth of February, 1578-9, Sir Nicholas 
Bacon died, after an illness of only a few days. His death, by 
a strange coincidence, was foreshadowed by a dream, which 
his son upon after reflection appears to have regarded almost 
as a sign of the coming disaster. ‘I myself remember,’ he 
says, ‘that being in Paris, and my father dying in London, 
two or three days before my father’s death I had a dream, 
which I told to divers English gentlemen, that my father’s 
house in the country was plastered all over with black mortar.’ 
(Sylva, cent. x. 986.) A month later, on the 2oth of March, 
1578-9, Bacon left Paris, bearing with him a despatch and 
commendations from Sir Amias Paulet to the Queen. His 
