ne of the most promising members of the profession. In 1584 he entered
Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Somersetshire, and two years later sat
for Liverpool. During these years the schism between his inner and his
outer life continued to widen. Drawing his first breath in the
atmosphere of the court, bred in the faith that honor and greatness come
from princes' favor, with a native taste for luxury and magnificence
which was fostered by delicate health, he steadily looked for
advancement through the influence of Burghley and the smiles of the
Queen. But Burghley had no sympathy with speculative thought, and
distrusted him for his confidences concerning his higher studies, while
he probably feared in Bacon a dangerous rival of his own son; so that
with expressions of kind interest, he refrained from giving his nephew
practical aid. Elizabeth, too, suspected that a young man who knew so
many things could not be trusted to know his own business well, and
preferred for important professional work others who were lawyers and
nothing besides. Thus Bacon appeared to the world as a disappointed and
uneasy courtier, struggling to keep up a certain splendor of appearance
and associations under a growing load of debt, and servile to a Queen on
whose caprice his prospects of a career must depend. His unquestioned
power at the bar was exercised only in minor causes; his eloquence and
political dexterity found slow recognition in Parliament, where they
represented only themselves; and the question whether he would ever be a
man of note in the kingdom seemed for twenty-five years to turn upon
what the Crown might do for its humble suitor.

Meanwhile this laborious advocate and indefatigable courtier, whose
labors at the bar and in attendance upon his great friends were enough
to fill the days of two ordinary men, led his real life in secret,
unknown to the world, and uncomprehended even by the few in whom he had
divined a capacity for great thought, and whom he had selected for his
confidants. From his childhood at the university, where he felt the
emptiness of the Aristotelian logic, the instrument for attaining truth
which traditional learning had consecrated, he had gradually formed the
conception of a more fruitful process. He had become convinced that the
learning of all past ages was but a poor result of the intellectual
capacities and labors which had been employed upon it; that the human
mind had never yet been properly used; t