were without education. This may have had an effect upon the son, but
we do not know, because we have no history of him of an informing sort.
There were but few books anywhere, in that day, and only the well-to-do
and highly educated possessed them, they being almost confined to
the dead languages. "All the valuable books then extant in all the
vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a single
shelf"--imagine it! The few existing books were in the Latin tongue
mainly. "A person who was ignorant of it was shut out from all
acquaintance--not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but with the most
interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time"--a
literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his fictitious
reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works would begin to use it
wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than
out of his teens and into his twenties.

At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years
there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English Ambassador,
and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and
the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years. A total of six
years spent at the sources of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of
men. The three spent at the university were coeval with the second
and last three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school
supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing
to infer from. The second three of the Baconian six were "presumably"
spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a butcher. That is, the
thugs presume it--on no evidence of any kind. Which is their way, when
they want a historical fact. Fact and presumption are, for business
purposes, all the same to them. They know the difference, but they also
know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a
fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long
to bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it. They know by old
experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is
not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to
develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of FACT, and make
him sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important
and insolent and come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure
authenticity with a thundering bellow that will convince everybody
because it is