Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583), when, if ever, he might have
penned sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, he reports that he wrote
"his first essay on the Instauration of Philosophy, which he called
Temporis Partus Maximus, 'The Greatest Birth of Time,'" and "we need
not doubt that between Law and Philosophy he found enough to do."
{275a} For the Baconians take Bacon to have been a very great lawyer
(of which I am no judge), and Law is a hard mistress, rapacious of a
man's hours. In 1584 he entered Parliament, but we do not hear
anything very important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote
a long pamphlet, "Touching the Controversies of the Church of
England." {275b} He had then leisure enough; that he was not
anonymously supplying the stage with plays I can neither prove nor
disprove: but there is no proof that he wrote Love's Labour's Lost!
By 1591-2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never
would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy. He
was apparently hard at scientific work. "I account my ordinary
course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of
action are." He adds, "The contemplative planet carries me away
wholly," and by contemplation I conceive him to mean what he calls
"vast contemplative ends." These he proceeds to describe: he does
NOT mean the writing of Venus and Adonis (1593), nor of Lucrece
(1594), nor of comedies! "I have taken all knowledge to be my
province," and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of
his period.
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