Gesta Grayorum, 1594, parts of which are printed by Spedding in type denoting doubtful authorship.
Bacon's device, 1594-1598.
Three letters to the Earl of Rutland on his travels, 1595-1596.
That is all! These are the compositions which follow each other without considerable interval, and by which we are to accompany him step by step through those seventeen years which should be the most important years in a man's life! He could have turned them out in ten days or a fortnight with ease. We expect from Mr. Spedding bread, and he gives us a stone!
This brilliant young man, who, when 15 years of age, left Cambridge, having possessed himself of all the knowledge it could afford to a student, who had travelled in France, Spain and Italy to "polish his mind and mould his opinion by intercourse with all kinds of foreigners," how was he occupying himself during what should be the most fruitful years of his life? Following his profession at the Bar? His affections did not that way tend. Spedding expresses the opinion that he had a distaste for his profession, and, writing of the circumstances with which he was surrounded in 1592, says: "I do not find that he was getting into practice. His main object still was to find ways and means for prosecuting his great philosophical enterprise." What was this enterprise? "I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate means," he says, writing to Burghley, "for I have taken all knowledge to be my province." This means more than mere academic philosophy.
In 1593, when Bacon was put forward and upheld for a year as a candidate for the post of Attorney-General, Spedding writes of him; "He had had little or no practice in the Courts; what proof he had given of professional proficiency was confined to his readings and exercises in Grays Inn.... Law, far from being his only, was not even his favourite study; ... his head was full of ideas so new and large that to most about him they must have seemed visionary."
Writing of him in 1594 Spedding says: "The strongest point against Bacon's pretensions for the Attorneyship was his want of practice. His opponents said that 'he had never entered the place of battle.'[20] Whether this was because he could not find clients or did not seek them I cannot say." In order to meet the objection, Bacon on the 25th January, 1593-4, made his first pleading, and Burghley sent his secretary "to congratulate unto him the first fruits of his public practice."
There is one other misconception to be corrected. It is urged that Bacon was, during this period, engrossed in Parliamentary life. From 1584 to 1597 five Parliaments were summoned. Bacon sat in each. In his twenty-fifth year he was elected member for Melcombe, in Dorsetshire. In the Parliament of 1586 he sat for Taunton, in that of 1588 for Liverpool, in that of 1592-3 for Middlesex, and in 1597 for Ipswich.
But the sittings of these Parliaments were not of long duration, and the speeches which he delivered and the meetings of committees upon which he was appointed would absorb but a small portion of his time. It must be patent, therefore, that Spedding does not account for his occupations from his return to England in 1578 until 1597, when the first small volume of his Essays was published.