Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/29

Rh year with a good knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics and a love of reading. There are those who doubt whether any system of education can produce a better result than that. Bacon was "drenched" in classicism, to use one of his own telling words. In after years when he sat down in his study to marshal his thoughts on any subject he recalled as if by instinct the wisdom of the ancients. He could command as easily the judgments of the great Greek and Roman historians as the imagination of the great Greek and Roman poets. Tacitus sums up for him in immortal phrase a contemporary character, and Homer and Vergil guide his expression in the vivid imagery that embroiders and illumines his language, like old carving in wood or stone, or the rich binding of a rare and princely book.

Besides Whitgift's accounts, two anecdotes of Bacon's undergraduate days survive, both as characteristic of the future philosopher as the story of the young Lord Keeper is of the future courtier. One is a reminiscence of his own recorded in Sylva Sylvarum, (Century II. 151),—

"I remember in Trinity College in Cambridge, there was an upper chamber, which being thought weak in the roof of it, was supported by a pillar of iron of the bigness of one's arm, in the midst of the chamber; which if you had struck, it would make a little flat noise in the room where it was struck, but it would make a great bomb in the chamber beneath." Dr. Rawley relates the other story,—"Whilst he was commorant [a resident] in the Rh