Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/230

 154 STATESMEN AND SAGES her administration enabled her to defeat all their purposes, to annoy and plunder them in their own dominions, and to preserve her own dignity untouched and unimpaired. Few monarchs have succeeded to a throne in more difficult circunv stances, nor have any ever reigned with more uniform success and prosperity. If, as a woman, cut off by the peculiarities of her situation from the sym- pathies of nature and the charm of equal affections, Elizabeth, at times suffered under these privations, which even gave to her sensibility additional force and acuteness, the strength of her reason still triumphed over her passions, and the struggle which her victories cost her served but to display the firmness of her resolution and the loftiness of her mind. The praises which have by some been bestowed upon Elizabeth for her re- gard for the constitution and tender concern for the liberties of the people, are wholly without foundation. Few princes have exerted with more arbitrary power the regal prerogatives which had been transmitted to her by her immedi- ate predecessors ; yet no censure belongs to her for this conduct, in the princi- ples of which she had been trained and of the justice of which she was per- suaded. What potentate, what man, has voluntarily resigned the power in which those beneath him quietly acquiesced ? Compared with the reigns of her father and sister, that of Elizabeth might be termed a golden age. FRANCIS BACON* BY HON. IGNATIUS DONNELLY (1561-1626) s JRANCIS BACON was born in York House, London, on January 22, 1561. Of this building only the ancient water-gate, fronting the Thames, survives the waste of time. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was for twenty years Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Eliza- beth a famous statesman, orator, and wit. His mother, Lady Ann Bacon, was the second daughter of the celebrated Sir Anthony Cooke, formerly tutor of King Edward VI., Henry VIII. 's short-lived son. She was a woman of great learning and many accomplishments, and of a strong, earnest, passionate, affectionate, and religious nature. Francis was the youngest of eight children, six of whom were by the first wife of Sir Nicholas. He belonged to the aristocracy of England, but not to that ancient, warlike race of battle-crowned warriors, whose pedigree dated back be- yond the Crusades. His father was a lawyer. Both his father's family and his mother's seem to have risen from the ranks on the great wave of the Reforma- tion ; they belonged to the intellectual new age, then dawning ; rather than to the rude, fighting age which was about to pass away. Francis was no accident
 * Copyright. 1894. by Seimar Hess.