the
commemorative volume issued by his congregation, _Leonard Bacon, Pastor of
the First Church in New Haven_ (New Haven, 1882), and there is a good
sketch in Williston Walker's _Ten New England Leaders_ (New York, 1901).

[v.03 p.0153] Leonard Bacon's sister DELIA BACON (1811-1859), born in
Tallmadge, Ohio, on the 2nd of February 1811, was a teacher in schools in
Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, and then, until about 1852, conducted
in various eastern cities, by methods devised by herself, classes for women
in history and literature. She wrote _Tales of the Puritans_ (1831), _The
Bride of Fort Edward_ (1839), based on the story of Jane McCrea, partly in
blank verse, and _The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded_
(1857), for which alone she is remembered. This book, in the preparation of
which she spent several years in study in England, where she was befriended
by Thomas Carlyle and especially by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was intended to
prove that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by a coterie of
men, including Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, for
the purpose of inculcating a philosophic system, for which they felt that
they themselves could not afford to assume the responsibility. This system
she professed to discover beneath the superficial text of the plays. Her
devotion to this one idea, as Hawthorne says, "had thrown her off her
balance," and while she was in England she lost her mind entirely. She died
in Hartford, Connecticut, on the 2nd of September 1859.

There is a biography by her nephew, Theodore Bacon, _Delia Bacon: A Sketch_
(Boston, 1888), and an appreciative chapter, "Recollections of a Gifted
Woman," in Nathaniel Hawthorne's _Our Old Home_ (Boston, 1863).

Leonard Bacon's son LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON (1830-1907), graduated at Yale in
1850, was pastor of various Congregational and Presbyterian churches, and
published _Church Papers_ (1876); _A Life Worth Living: Life of Emily Bliss
Gould_ (1878); _Irenics and Polemics and Sundry Essays in Church History_
(1895); _History of American Christianity_ (1898); and _The
Congregationalists_ (1904).

(W. WR.)

BACON, SIR NICHOLAS (1509-1579), lord keeper of the great seal of England
during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was the second son of Robert Bacon of
Drinkstone, Suffolk, and was born at Chislehurst. He was educated at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1527, and afterwards spent
some time