A CHRONOGRAPHIC PARALLEL
Bacon at 24, in a letter to the Queen’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, urges his some time pending suit, which is to determine his “course of practice”—supposed to mean a shortening of the five years’ probation required to become a pleader.
He writes an essay entitled “Greatest Birth of Time,” foreshadowing his scientific works.
His mother in her zeal for the Nonconformists urges their cause in person before Lord Treasurer Burleigh, and follows it by a letter to the same in which she says:
“I confess as one that hath found mercy, that I have profited more in the inward feeling knowledge of God his holy will, though but in small measure, by an ordinary preaching within these seven or eight years, than I did by hearing odd sermons at Paul’s well nigh twenty years together.”
Shakspere at 21 is still living at Stratford, the father of three children—two of them twins. His father is said to have been a butcher as well as a dealer in wool; and gossiping John Aubrey says he was told by some of the neighbors that when the boy William “kill’d a calfe, he wold doe it in a high style, and make a speeche.”
Mr. Richard Grant White guesses that William may have gone to London this year or the next.
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Bacon at 25 writes a letter, May 6th, to Lord Treasurer Burleigh, his uncle, saying:
“I find in my simple observation that they which live as it were in umbra and not in public or frequent action, how moderately and modestly soever they behave themselves, yet laborant inmdia. I find also that such persons as are of nature bashful (as myself is,) whereby they want that plausible familiarity which others have, are often mistaken for proud. But once I know well, and I most humbly beseech your Lordship to believe that arrogancy and overweening is so far from my nature, as, if I think well of myself in anything, it is in this, that I am free from that vice.”
He is again elected to Parliament. The conspirators who attempted to liberate Mary of Scotland have been tried, condemned, and sentenced. The case is brought before the Parliament. Bacon is one of the speakers in “the Great Cause,” and one of the committees to whom it is referred.
Shakspere at 22 is probably still at Stratford, though Mr. White presumes he has become connected with the London stage this year, or perhaps a little later.
[To be continued to the end of both lives, making a book of 300 pages or more, including this pamphlet as an appendix, with important additions. All the essential facts of Lord Bacon’s life will be presented, whereby his secret authorship will be more abundantly proved, and his moral character vindicated against the aspersions of 260 years.]
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*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BACON AND SHAKSPERE ***