than a thug, is the merit mine? No, it is His. Then to Him be the
praise. That is the right spirit.

They "presume" the lad severed his "presumed" connection with the
Stratford school to become apprentice to a butcher. They also
"presume" that the butcher was his father. They don't know. There
is no written record of it, nor any other actual evidence. If it
would have helped their case any, they would have apprenticed him
to thirty butchers, to fifty butchers, to a wilderness of butchers-
-all by their patented method "presumption." If it will help their
case they will do it yet; and if it will further help it, they will
"presume" that all those butchers were his father. And the week
after, they will SAY it. Why, it is just like being the past tense
of the compound reflexive adverbial incandescent hypodermic
irregular accusative Noun of Multitude; which is father to the
expression which the grammarians call Verb. It is like a whole
ancestry, with only one posterity.

To resume. Next, the young Bacon took up the study of law, and
mastered that abstruse science. From that day to the end of his
life he was daily in close contact with lawyers and judges; not as
a casual onlooker in intervals between holding horses in front of a
theatre, but as a practicing lawyer--a great and successful one, a
renowned one, a Launcelot of the bar, the most formidable lance in
the high brotherhood of the legal Table Round; he lived in the
law's atmosphere thenceforth, all his years, and by sheer ability
forced his way up its difficult steeps to its supremest summit, the
Lord Chancellorship, leaving behind him no fellow craftsman
qualified to challenge his divine right to that majestic place.