correspondent of De Thou. When Bacon was hardly sixteen he was admitted
to the Society of "Ancients" of Gray's Inn, and he went in the household
of Sir Amyas Paulet, the Queen's Ambassador, to France. He thus spent
two years in France, not in Paris alone, but at Blois, Tours, and
Poitiers. If this was precocious, there is no indication that it was
thought precocious. It only meant that clever and promising boys were
earlier associated with men in important business than is customary now.
The old and the young heads began to work together sooner. Perhaps they
felt that there was less time to spare. In spite of instances of
longevity, life was shorter for the average of busy men, for the
conditions of life were worse.

Two recollections only have been preserved of his early years. One is
that, as he told his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, late in life, he had
discovered, as far back as his Cambridge days, the "unfruitfulness" of
Aristotle's method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is not
uncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text-books; it was the
fashion with clever men, as, for instance, Montaigne, to talk against
Aristotle without knowing anything about him; it is not uncommon for men
who have worked out a great idea to find traces of it, on precarious
grounds, in their boyish thinking. Still, it is worth noting that Bacon
himself believed that his fundamental quarrel with Aristotle had begun
with the first efforts of thought, and that this is the one recollection
remaining of his early tendency in speculation. The other is more
trustworthy, and exhibits that inventiveness which was characteristic
of his mind. He tells us in the _De Augmentis_ that when he was in
France he occupied himself with devising an improved system of
cypher-writing--a thing of daily and indispensable use for rival
statesmen and rival intriguers. But the investigation, with its call on
the calculating and combining faculties, would also interest him, as an