'When Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, lived, every room in Gorhambury was served with a pipe of water from the pond distant about a mile off. In the lifetime of Mr. Anthony Bacon the water ceased, and his lordship coming to the inheritance could not recover the water without infinite charge. When he was Lord Chancellor, he built Verulam House _close by the pond yard, for a place of privacy_ when he was called upon to dispatch any urgent business. And being asked why he built there, his lordship answered that, seeing _he could not carry the water to_ his House, he _would carry his House_ to the water.]

This is not the place for the particulars of this history or for the barest outline of them. They make a volume of themselves. But this glimpse of the circumstances under which the works were composed which it is the object of this volume to open, appeared at the last moment to be required, in the absence of the Historical Key which the proper development of them makes, to that Art of Delivery and Tradition by means of which the secrets of the Elizabethan Age have been conveyed to us.

CHAPTER III.

EXTRACTS FROM THE LIFE OF RALEIGH.--RALEIGH'S SCHOOL

'Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in _living_ Art.'
'What is the _end_ of study? let me know.'_Love's Labour's Lost_.

But it was not on the New World wholly, that this man of many toils could afford to lavish the revenues which the Queen's favour brought him. It was not to that enterprise alone that he was willing to dedicate the _eclat_ and influence of his rising name. There was work at home which concerned him more nearly, not less deeply, to which that new influence was made at once subservient; and in that there were enemies to be encountered more formidable than the Spaniard on his own deck, or on his own coast, with all his war-weapons and defences. It was an enemy which required a strategy more subtle than any which the exigencies of camp and field had called for.