bans' village, is in the midst of the most charming rural scenery in
England, or in the world. There a great part of his youth and early
manhood was passed.

[Illustration: Francis Bacon. [TN]]

He came into this breathing world when the human race were upon the
threshold of the tremendous development which now surrounds us. He was
born sixty-nine years after Columbus had re-opened the long-closed
pathway from the eastern to the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean;
twenty-seven years after the French took possession of Canada; twelve
years after the Portuguese settled in Brazil; and forty-six years before
the first English colonists landed at Jamestown, Va. The degree of
advancement of the mind of the age will be understood when it is
remembered that it was only one hundred and twenty-five years, at the
date of Bacon's birth, since Guttenberg had invented movable types, in
Germany; and but eighty-seven years since Caxton set up his printing
press at Westminster. No man has ever lived who did more than Bacon to
change the opinions and condition of those who came after him.

It was a "day of little things." England contained less than five
million inhabitants, and of these probably not one-tenth spoke a
language which could be understood to-day by the English-using people of
the world. The mass of the populace were steeped to the lips in
brutality and ignorance. The houses of the peasants were built of
"sticks and dirt;" many of them "without chimneys or glazed windows;"
the habits of the people were "inconceivably filthy;" "scurvy and
leprosy were endemic;" the schools did not, as a rule, teach English;
the amusements of the populace were bear-baitings and dancing naked in
barns; the people of one county could not understand the speech of the
inhabitants of the next county; "the disputes about tithes and
boundaries were usually settled by bands of armed men, and the records
of the Star-Chamber swarm with such cases." Education was at a low ebb.
"In one year, 1570 (Bacon was then nine years of age), the scholars of
Trinity College, Cambridge, consumed 2,250 barrels of beer." Many of the
graduates became beggars; and so extensive was this evil that
Parliament, by an act of 14th Elizabeth, declared that "all scholars of
the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge that go about begging, not being
authorized under the seal of the said universities," are declared
"vagabonds" and punished as such. But even this was an improvemen