s to be intrusted by him with a mission to her majesty
requiring secrecy and dispatch, of which he acquitted himself with great
applause. Returning to France, he engaged in several excursions through
its different provinces, and diligently occupied himself in the
collection of facts and observations, which he afterwards threw together
in a "Brief View of the State of Europe;" a work, however juvenile,
which is said to exhibit much both of the peculiar spirit and of the
method of its illustrious author. But the death of his father, in 1580,
put an end to his travels, and cast a melancholy blight upon his opening
prospects.

For Anthony Bacon, the eldest of his sons by his second marriage, the
lord keeper had handsomely provided by the gift of his manor of
Gorhambury, and he had amassed a considerable sum with which he was
about to purchase another estate for the portion of the younger, when
death interrupted his design; and only one-fifth of this money falling
to Francis under the provisions of his father's will, he unexpectedly
found himself compelled to resort to the practice of some gainful
profession for his support. That of the law naturally engaged his
preference. He entered himself of Gray's Inn, and passed within its
precincts several studious years, during which he made himself master of
the general principles of jurisprudence, as well as of the rules of
legal practice in his own country; and he also found leisure to trace
the outlines of his new philosophy in a work not now known to exist in a
separate state, but incorporated probably in one of his more finished
productions. In 1588 her majesty, desirous perhaps of encouraging a more
entire devotion of his talents to the study of the law, distinguished
him by the title of her Counsel extraordinary,--an office of little
emolument, though valuable as an introduction to practice. But the
genius of Bacon disdained to plod in the trammels of a laborious
profession; he felt that it was given him for higher and larger
purposes: yet perceiving, at the same time, that the narrowness of his
circumstances would prove an insuperable bar to his ambition of
becoming, as he once beautifully expressed it, "the servant of
posterity," he thus, in 1591, solicited the patronage of his uncle lord
Burleigh: "Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me; for
though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful; yet
my health is not to spend, nor my course to