There is one person very intimately connected with Bacon, whom Mr Spedding has brought before us with a novel distinctness—his mother, Lady Bacon. We are not aware that her presence will throw much light on the character of her son, but henceforth, we are sure, no biography of the son will be written in which this lady will not be a conspicuous figure. She is one of those strongly-marked characters that always please the imagination; dogmatic, perverse, full of maternal anxiety, pious and splenetic, with marvellous shrewd sense and a very ungovernable temper. The knowledge of her character would enable us to answer one question. Presuming that any one should think fit to ask why Bacon did not seek the retirement of Gorhambury, the answer is quite ready. There would have been no peace for him under the roof of his lady mother. Puritan and termagant, his philosophy would have been “suspect” to her; and his retirement would have been certainly denounced as unpardonable sloth. She is a learned lady, mingles scraps of Latin and Greek in her epistles, and she can write, when the occasion demands, in a very stately English style—stately, but straightforward withal. Her son’s epistolary style is often involved and verbose. He does not often come so directly to the point as Lady Bacon does in the following letter, written to Lord Burghley, in the interest of the Nonconformist clergy, or _Preachers_, as they were then called. In a conference which had lately taken place at Lambeth between them and the bishops, she thinks they had not fair-play; she appeals, in their name, to her Majesty and the Council:— “They would most humbly crave, both of God in heaven, whose cause it is, and of their Majesty, their most excellent sovereign here on earth, that they might obtain quiet and convenient audience rather before her Majesty herself, whose heart is in God his hand to touch and to turn, or before your Honours of the Council, whose wisdom they greatly reverence; and if they cannot strongly prove before you out of the word of God that reformation which they so long have called and cried for to be according to Christ his own ordinance, then to let them be rejected with shame out of the Church for ever.... And therefore, for such weighty conference they appeal to her Majesty and her honourable wise Council, whom God has placed in highest authority for the advancement of His kingdom; and refuse the bishops for judges, who are parties partial in their own defence, because they seek more worldly ambition than the glory of Jesus Christ.”