vi PREFACE, 
desk put up in his study, that his stockings were dyed at 
a cost of 12d., that his laundress’s bill from Midsummer to 
Michaelmas was 3 shillings, that his hose were mended, his 
windows glazed, two dozen silk points, a pair of pantofles and 
pumps bought for him, and a dozen new buttons set on his 
doublet. Some books the brothers brought with them from 
London. With others they were furnished by the Master, as 
Livy, Cicero, Demosthenes’ Olynthiacs, Homer’s Iliad, Cesar, 
Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Sallust, and Hermogenes. “There 
is an interval in the accounts from the latter part of August, 
1574, to the 21st of March following; during which time the 
plague raged in Cambridge, and the members of the Uni- 
versity were dispersed. The only record of Bacon’s residence 
at Trinity is a reminiscence of his own preserved in the Sylva 
Sylvarum (cent. ii. 151), which shows that at this early period 
he had begun to observe natural phenomena. ‘I remember,’ 
he says, ‘in Trinity College in Cambridge, there was an upper 
chamber, which being thought weak in the roof of it, was 
supported by a pillar of iron, of the bigness of one’s arm, in 
the midst of the chamber; which if you had struck, it would 
make a little flat noise in the room where it was struck, but it 
would make a great bomb in the chamber beneath.’ We may 
possibly have here a description of the rooms occupied by the 
two brothers, but if so they must have been in the buildings 
of King’s Hall, removed by Dr. Nevill in constructing the pre- 
sent Old Court. No tradition of their whereabouts remains. 
If we add to these fragments an anecdote related by Dr. Raw- 
ley, his chaplain and earliest biographer, we are in possession 
of all that is known of Francis Bacon up to the time that he 
completed his fifteenth year. Rawley’s story introduces us to 
a child of singular gravity and adroitness, the future Chan- 
cellor and courtier. The Queen ‘delighted much then to 
confer with him, and to prove him with questions; unto 
whom he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity 
above his years, that Her Majesty would often term him 
“The young Lord Keeper.” Being asked by the Queen how 
. old he was, he answered with much discretion, being then 
