PREFACE. 
FRANCIS BACON was born on the 22nd of January, 1560-1, 
at York House in the Strand, the residence. of his father 
Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Sixty 
years later, Ben Jonson sang of him as 
‘England’s high Chancellor; the destined heir, 
In his soft cradle, to his father’s chair,’ 
His mother, Anne Cooke, whose eldest sister was married to 
Lord Burleigh, was his father’s second wife, and had borne 
_him two children. Anthony, the friend and correspondent of 
Essex, was two years older than Francis. Of their childhood 
nothing is known. In April, 1573, when Francis was little 
more than twelve years old, the two brothers were entered 
as fellow-commoners at Trinity College, Cambridge, and ma- 
triculated between the roth and 13th of June in the same year. 
They were placed under the care of Dr. Whitgift, Master of the 
College, who found this distinguished position not inconsistent 
with holding the Deanery of Lincoln, a Canonry at Ely, and the 
Rectory of Teversham; having, however, previously resigned 
the Regius Professorship of Divinity. From an account-book 
which he kept, and which was published by the late Dr. Mait- 
land in the British Magazine (vols. xxxii. xxxiii), we glean 
the meagre facts of Francis Bacon’s University career. We 
learn, for instance, that during the period of his residence in 
College, from April 5, 1573, to Christmas 1575, the Master’s 
parental care supplied him with so many pairs of shoes, a bow 
and quiver of arrows, that there was oil bought for his neck, 
and certain money paid to the ‘ potigarie’ when he was sick, 
and for meat probably as he was recovering, that he had a 
