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 example of the discovery of new powers by the human mind.

In the beginning of 1579 Bacon, at eighteen, was called home by his father’s death.  This was a great blow to his prospects.  His father had not accomplished what he had intended for him, and Francis Bacon was left with only a younger son’s “narrow portion.”  What was worse, he lost one whose credit would have served him in high places.  He entered on life, not as he might have expected, independent and with court favour on his side, but with his very livelihood to gain—­a competitor at the bottom of the ladder for patronage and countenance.  This great change in his fortunes told very unfavourably on his happiness, his usefulness, and, it must be added, on his character.  He accepted it, indeed, manfully, and at once threw himself into the study of the law as the profession by which he was to live.  But the law, though it was the only path open to him, was not the one which suited his genius, or his object in life.  To the last he worked hard and faithfully, but with doubtful reputation as to his success, and certainly against the grain.  And this was not the worst.  To make up for the loss of that start in life of which his father’s untimely death had deprived him, he became, for almost the rest of his life, the most importunate and most untiring of suitors.

In 1579 or 1580 Bacon took up his abode at Gray’s Inn, which for a long time was his home.  He went through the various steps of his profession.  He began, what he never discontinued, his earnest and humble appeals to his relative the great Lord Burghley, to employ him in the Queen’s service, or to put him in some place of independence:  through Lord Burghley’s favour he seems to have been