the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his
twenties.
At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent
three years there. Thence he went to Paris in the train of the
English Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the
cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during
another three years. A total of six years spent at the sources
of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men. The three
spent at the university were coeval with the second and last
three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school
supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference–with
nothing to infer from. The second three of the Baconian six were
“presumably” spent by the Stratford lad as apprentice to a
butcher. That is, the thugs presume it–on no evidence of any
kind. Which is their way, when they want a historical fact.
Fact and presumption are, for business purposes, all the same to
them. They know the difference, but they also know how to blink
it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is
better than a presumption, it doesn’t take a presumption long to
bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it. They know
by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-
tadpole he is not going to STAY tadpole in their history-tank;
no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged
bullfrog of FACT, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out
his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and
assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity with a thundering
bellow that will convince everybody because it is so loud.
The thug is aware that loudness convinces sixty persons where
reasoning convinces but one. I wouldn’t be a thug, not even if–
but never mind about that, it has nothing to do with the argument,
and it is not noble in spirit besides. If I am better 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 theater, 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.
When we read the praises bestowed by Lord Penzance and the
other illustrious experts upon the legal condition and legal
aptnesses, brilliances, profundities, and felicities so
prodigally displayed in the Plays, and try to fit them to the
historyless Stratford stage-manager, they sound wild, strange,
incredible, ludicrous; but when we put them in the mouth of Bacon
they do not sound strange, they seem in their natural and
rightful place, they seem at home there. Please turn back and