and policy? Was he too open to new impressions, made by objections or
rival views? Or did he show signs of wanting backbone to stand amid
difficulties and threatening prospects? Did Burghley see something in
him of the pliability which he could remember as the serviceable quality
of his own young days--which suited those days of rapid change, but not
days when change was supposed to be over, and when the qualities which
were wanted were those which resist and defy it? The only thing that is
clear is that Burghley, in spite of Bacon's continual applications,
abstained to the last from advancing his fortunes.

Whether employed by government or not, Bacon began at this time to
prepare those carefully-written papers on the public affairs of the day,
of which he has left a good many. In our day they would have been
pamphlets or magazine articles. In his they were circulated in
manuscript, and only occasionally printed. The first of any importance
is a letter of advice to the Queen, about the year 1585, on the policy
to be followed with a view to keeping in check the Roman Catholic
interest at home and abroad. It is calm, sagacious, and, according to
the fashion of the age, slightly Machiavellian. But the first subject on
which Bacon exhibited his characteristic qualities, his appreciation of
facts, his balance of thought, and his power, when not personally
committed, of standing aloof from the ordinary prejudices and
assumptions of men round him, was the religious condition and prospects
of the English Church. Bacon had been brought up in a Puritan household
of the straitest sect. His mother was an earnest, severe, and intolerant
Calvinist, deep in the interests and cause of her party, bitterly
resenting all attempts to keep in order its pretensions. She was a
masterful woman, claiming to meddle with her brother-in-law's policy,
and though a most affectionate mother she was a woman of violent and
ungovernable temper. Her letters to her son Antony, whom she loved