1. If the Parliament met November 23, 1584, as Mr. Spedding distinctly says, then Bacon was not yet twenty-four.
An ideal tableau of the youthful statesman is gaily depicted by Wm. Hepworth Dixon, in his “Personal History of Lord Bacon:”
“How he appears in outward guise and aspect among these courtly and martial contemporaries the miniature of Hilyard helps us to conceive. Slight in build, rosy and round in fleshy dight in a sumptuous suit, the head well-set, erect, and framed in a thick starched fence of frill; a bloom of study and travel on the fat, girlish face, which looks far younger than his years; the hat and feather tossed aside from the white brow, over which, crisps and curls a mane of dark, soft hair; an English nose, firm, open, straight; a mouth delicate and small—a lady’s or jester’s mouth—a thousand pranks and humors, quibbles, whims and laughters lurking in its twinkling, tremulous lines;—such is Francis Bacon at the age of twenty-four.”
Bearing in mind that Bacon is three years and three months older than Shakspere, we will now parallel their lives by successive years.
A. D. 1585. Bacon at 24, in a letter to the Queen’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, urges his some time pending suit, which is to determine his “course of practice”—supposed to mean a shortening of the five years’ probation required to become a pleader.
He writes an essay entitled “Greatest Birth of Time,” foreshadowing his scientific works.
His mother in her zeal for the Nonconformists urges their cause in person before Lord Treasurer Burleigh, and follows it by a letter to the same in which she says:
“I confess as one that hath found mercy, that I have profited more in the inward feeling knowledge of God his holy will, though but in small measure, by an ordinary preaching within these seven or eight years, than I did by hearing odd sermons at Paul’s well nigh twenty years together.”
Shakspere at 21 is still living at Stratford, the father of three children—two of them twins. His father is said to have been a butcher as well as a dealer in wool; and gossiping John Aubrey says he was told by some of the neighbors that when the boy William “kill’d a calfe, he wold doe it in a high style, and make a speeche.”