Francis Bacon - 1885 Author:Edwin Abbott Abbott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART I THE LIFE OF FRANCIS BACON § 1 The Court Of Elizabeth 1 Somewhere in the correspondence of Anthony Bacon, Francis Bacon's brother, there occurs th... more »e following descript1on of the Four Arts, without which no one could hope to succeed at Court in the later days of Queen Elizabeth : " Cog, lie, flatter and face, Four ways in Court to win men grace. If thou be thrall to none of these, Away, good Piers ! Home, John Cheese ! "a Criticism in verse is generally too epigrammatic to be accurate, but certainly the doggerel just quoted will not seem very overstrained to any one who turns over Birch's Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth or the MS. of Anthony Bacon's correspondence. In the nation at large there was no lack of moral health; but the Court breathed an atmosphere of falsehood and intrigue. Intellect had free play, literature throve, the English language was in such perfection that it seemed impossible for the men and women of those days to write weakly or nervelessly; but truthfulness seemed extinct about the Queen. The old religion was dead, and the new religion had taken no hold of the royal circle. Greece and Rome were recognised as the model states, and Machiavelli as the great authority on politics. 1 The greater part of this chapter is extracted from my Bacon and Essex. Seeley and Co., 1877, pp. 1-12. t These verses must have been quoted by the writer, whoever he was, from Roger Ascham. (Schokmaster, Arber's edition, p. 54.) As for applying the principles of Christianity to politics, we, in these days, cannot be surprised that the Elizabethan politicians did not dream of doing it; but they went far beyond us in their consistent disregard for truthfulness. Essex himself, though naturally one of the bluntest of men, confesses that, in order to s...« less