t 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 countries," 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
knew 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 assure 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 father 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 became 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 th