This description is inaccurate as applied to John Barclay, but in every detail it describes Francis Bacon.

A comparison has been made between the editions of 1625 and 1629 with the 1621 Latin edition. It leaves little room for doubting that the 1625 is the original work. Throughout the Latin appears to follow it rather than to be the leader; whilst the 1629 edition follows the Latin closely. In some cases the word used in the 1625 edition has been incorrectly translated into the 1621 edition, and the Latin word re-translated literally and incorrectly in view of the sense in the 1629 edition. But space forbids this comparison being further followed; suffice it to say that everything points to the 1625 edition being the original work.

As to the date of composition much may be said; but the present contention is that "The French Academie," "The Argenis," and "Love's Labour's Lost" are productions from the same pen, and that they all represent the work of Francis Bacon probably between the years 1577 and 1580. At any rate, the first-named was written whilst he was in France, and the others were founded on the incidents and experience obtained during his sojourn there.

Chapter VIII.
BACON IN FRANCE, 1576-1579.

This brilliant young scholar landed with Sir Amias Paulet at Calais on the 25th of September, 1576, and with him went straight to the Court of Henry III. of France. It is remarkable that neither Montagu, Spedding, Hepworth Dixon, nor any other biographer seems to have thought it worth while to consider under what influences he was brought when he arrived there at the most impressionable period of his life. Hepworth Dixon, without stating his authority, says that he "quits the galleries of the Louvre and St. Cloud with his morals pure," but nothing more. And yet Francis Bacon arrived in France at the most momentous epoch in the history of French literature. This boy, with his marvellous intellect—the same intellect which nearly half a century later produced the "Novum Organum"—with a memory saturated with the records of antiquity and with the writings of the classical authors, with an industry beyond the capacity and a mind beyond the reach of his contemporaries, skilled in the teachings of the philosophers, with independence of thought and a courage which enabled him to condemn the methods of study followed at the University where he had spent three years; this boy who had a "beam of knowledge derived from God" upon him, who "had not his knowledge from books, but from some grounds and notions from himself," and above and beyond all who was conscious of his powers and had unbounded confidence in his capacity for using them; this boy walked beside the English Ambassador elect into the highest circles of French Society at the time when the most important factors of influence were Ronsard and his confrères of the Pléiade. He had left behind him in his native country a language crude and almost barbaric, incapable of giving expression to the knowledge which he possessed and the thoughts which resulted therefrom.

At this time there were few books written in the English tongue which could make any pretence to be considered literature: Sir Thomas Eliot's "The Governor," Robert Ascham's "The Schoolmaster," and Thomas Wright's "Arts of Rhetoric," almost exhaust the list. Thynne's edition, 1532, and Lidgate's edition, 1561, of Chaucer's works are not intelligible. Only in the 1598 edition can the great poet be read with any understanding. The work of re-casting the poems for this edition was Bacon's, and he is the man referred to in the following lines, which are prefixed to it:—

The Reader to Geffrey Chaucer.

Rea.—Where hast thou dwelt, good Geffrey al this while,
Unknown to us save only by thy bookes?
Chau.—In haulks, and hernes, God wot, and in exile,
Where none vouchsaft to yeeld me words or lookes:
Till one which saw me there, and knew my friends,
Did bring me forth: such grace sometimes God sends.
Rea.—But who is he that hath thy books repar'd,
And added moe, whereby thou are more graced?
Chau.—The selfe same man who hath no labor spar'd,
To helpe what time and writers had defaced:
And made old words, which were unknoun of many,
So plaine, that now they may be knoun of any.
Rea.—Well fare his heart: I love him for thy sake,
Who for thy sake hath taken all this pains.
Chau.—Would God I knew some means amends to make,
That for his toile he might receive some gains.
But wot ye what? I know his kindnesse such,
That for my good he thinks no pains too much:
And more than that; if he had knoune in time,
He would have left no fault in prose nor rime.