ng for
disputations and contentions but barren of the production of works for
the benefit of the life of man." As a law student of twenty-one he
sketched in a tract on the "Greatest Birth of Time" the system of
inductive enquiry which he was already prepared to substitute for it.
The speculations of the young thinker however were interrupted by his
hopes of Court success. But these were soon dashed to the ground. He was
left poor by his father's death; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his
advancement with the Queen: and a few years before Shakspere's arrival
in London Bacon entered as a barrister at Gray's Inn. He soon became one
of the most successful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three Bacon was a
member of the House of Commons, and his judgement and eloquence at once
brought him to the front. "The fear of every man that heard him was lest
he should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his
reputation was quickened in 1597 by the appearance of his "Essays," a
work remarkable, not merely for the condensation of its thought and its
felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power with which it
applied to human life that experimental analysis which Bacon was at a
later time to make the key of Science.

His fame at once became great at home and abroad, but with this nobler
fame Bacon could not content himself. He was conscious of great powers
as well as great aims for the public good: and it was a time when such
aims could hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. But
political employment seemed farther off than ever. At the outset of his
career in Parliament he irritated Elizabeth by a firm opposition to her
demand of a subsidy; and though the offence was atoned for by profuse
apologies and by the cessation of all further resistance to the policy
of the Court, the law offices of the Crown were more than once refused
to him, and it was only after the publication of his "Essays" that he
could obtain some slight promotion as a Queen's Counsel. The moral
weakness which more and more disclosed itself is the best justification
of the Queen in her reluctance--a reluctance so greatly in contrast with
her ordinary course--to bring the wisest head in her realm to her
Council-board. The men whom Elizabeth employed were for the most part
men whose intellect was directed by a strong sense of public duty. Their
reverence for the Queen, strangely exaggerated as it may seem to us, was
guided and