and demands; the same radical disposition of temper reveals itself in
his dealings with men: they, too, must be won by yielding to them, by
adapting himself to their moods and ends; by spying into the drift of
their humour, by subtly and pliantly falling in with it, by circuitous
and indirect processes, the fruit of vigilance and patient thought. He
thought to direct, while submitting apparently to be directed. But he
mistook his strength. Nature and man are different powers, and under
different laws. He chose to please man, and not to follow what his soul
must have told him was the better way. He wanted, in his dealings with
men, that sincerity on which he insisted so strongly in his dealings
with nature and knowledge. And the ruin of a great life was the
consequence.

Francis Bacon was born in London on the 22d of January, 1560/61, three
years before Galileo. He was born at York House, in the Strand; the
house which, though it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had been
lately tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, in which Bacon
himself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, and which passed after his
fall into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark in
the Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the garden of
the Thames Embankment. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's
first Lord Keeper, the fragment of whose effigy in the Crypt of St.
Paul's is one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire.
His uncle by marriage was that William Cecil who was to be Lord
Burghley. His mother, the sister of Lady Cecil, was one of the daughters
of Sir Antony Cook, a person deep in the confidence of the reforming
party, who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a remarkable woman,
highly accomplished after the fashion of the ladies of her party, and as
would become her father's daughter and the austere and laborious family
to which she belonged. She was "exquisitely skilled in the Greek and