V\ PREFACE. 



desk put up in his study, that his stockings were dyed at 

 a cost of izd., 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, Csesar, 

 Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Sallust, and Hermogenes. There 

 is an interval in the accounts from the latter part of August, 

 1574) to the 2ist 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 

 &quot; The young Lord Keeper.&quot; Being asked by the Queen how 

 old he was, he answered with much discretion, being then 



