156 STATESMEN AND SAGES punished as such. But even this was an improvement on Henry VIII.'s time; when three hundred men were hanged in London for soliciting alms. The only illuminated spot in all this darkness was the Court in London. Here they talked something which we would to-day call English ; here they caught, through France and Italy, a reflected light from the dying glories of the ancient Roman civilization ; here the travelled wealthy, " the picked men of coun- tries," brought home some of the culture of more refined races. Bacon says : " Courts are but only superficial schools To dandle fools ; The rural parts are turned into a den Of savage men ; And where's the city, from foul vice so free, But may be termed the worst of all the three?" In this curious, primitive, rude, ensmalled age, grew up the great man who was to do so much to change it all. From his early years he manifested that vastly active intellect "which knev no rest save in motion." He studied, as a child, the nature of echoes in a tunnel. At fifteen years of age (so his chaplain Rawley and his biographer Spedding as- sure us), he had realized the shallowness of the Aristotelian philosophy and had thought out those principles which have since revolutionized human society. There are reasons to believe that he was the child of fifteen, referred to by the Rosicrucians, who planned the foundation of their society, and, at that early age, wrote the " Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz," first published in 1616. At about twelve years of age he went to Cambridge to Trinity College- rooming with his brother Anthony, who was two years his senior. In June, 1576, he left the university and became an ancient of the Gray's Inn law-society. On September 25, 1576, he accompanied Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador, to France. Here he witnessed the sixth civil war of the French people. He followed the court through several of the French provinces ; he resided for three months at Poitiers. About February 17, 1579, he dreamed that his father's house in the country was all covered over with black mortar. At the same time his lather was taken sick and died in three days thereafter. He returned home on March 20, 1579, to find himself poor. As he said, he could not "live to study," but had " to study to live." He beca'me a practising lawyer, but he did not like the profession. He feared " the bar would be his bier ; " it absorbed time which he thought should be dedicated to better ends. We think we find the expression of his heart in the lines of the so-called Shakespeare Sonnet : " O, for my sake, do thou with fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide, Than public means, which public manners breeds."
