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Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley by Richard William Church
page 9 of 212 (04%)
Latin tongues;" she was passionately religious, according to the
uncompromising religion which the exiles had brought back with them from
Geneva, Strasburg, and Zurich, and which saw in Calvin's theology a
solution of all the difficulties, and in his discipline a remedy for all
the evils, of mankind. This means that his boyhood from the first was
passed among the high places of the world--at one of the greatest crises
of English history--in the very centre and focus of its agitations. He
was brought up among the chiefs and leaders of the rising religion, in
the houses of the greatest and most powerful persons of the State, and
naturally, as their child, at times in the Court of the Queen, who joked
with him, and called him "her young Lord Keeper." It means also that the
religious atmosphere in which he was brought up was that of the nascent
and aggressive Puritanism, which was not satisfied with the compromises
of the Elizabethan Reformation, and which saw in the moral poverty and
incapacity of many of its chiefs a proof against the great traditional
system of the Church which Elizabeth was loath to part with, and which,
in spite of all its present and inevitable shortcomings, her political
sagacity taught her to reverence and trust.

At the age of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and put under Whitgift at
Trinity. It is a question which recurs continually to readers about
those times and their precocious boys, what boys were then? For whatever
was the learning of the universities, these boys took their place with
men and consorted with them, sharing such knowledge as men had, and
performing exercises and hearing lectures according to the standard of
men. Grotius at eleven was the pupil and companion of Scaliger and the
learned band of Leyden; at fourteen he was part of the company which
went with the ambassadors of the States-General to Henry IV.; at sixteen
he was called to the bar, he published an out-of-the-way Latin writer,
Martianus Capella, with a learned commentary, and he was the
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