Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/34

Rh late rising and long lying in bed, whereby his men are made slothful and himself continueth sickly." Gorhambury, 24 May, 1592.)

It may be that Francis Bacon burned the midnight oil, for he worked hard at his profession and he rose rapidly into notice. In 1584, at the age of twenty-three, he was elected to Parliament for Melcombe Regis; in 1586, he sat for Taunton. The "great year" '88, the year of the Armada, made him member for Liverpool and Reader at Gray's Inn. In all Bacon was elected to the House of Commons eight times and his Parliamentary career covered the thirty years between 1584 and 1614. As a member of the Lower House Bacon combined qualities very seldom found in the same person. He was a useful and able committee-man, a ready writer, and a good speaker. With rare good fortune there has come down to us the impression he made as a public speaker on his two great contemporaries, Sir Walter Ralegh and Ben Jonson. Dr. Rawley says,—"I will only set down what I heard Sir Walter Ralegh once speak of him by way of comparison (whose judgment may well be trusted), That the Earl of Salisbury [his cousin, Robert Cecil] was an excellent speaker, but no good penman; that the Earl of Northampton (the Lord Henry Howard) was an excellent penman, but no good speaker; but that Sir Francis Bacon was eminent in both." Ben Jonson's testimony to Bacon's eloquence is itself nobly eloquent: In Timber; or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (Dominus Verulamius), he writes,—"Yet there hapn'd, in my time, one noble Rh