Shirley, 1594-1666: delineates fashionable life with success. His best plays are _The Maid's Revenge_, _The Politician_, and _The Lady of Pleasure_. The last suggested to Van Brugh his character of Lady Townly, in _The Provoked Husband_. Lamb says Shirley "was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common. A new language and quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest came in at the Restoration." Thomas Dekker, died about 1638: wrote, besides numerous tracts, twenty-eight plays. The principal are _Old Fortunatus_, _The Honest Whore_, and _Satiro-Mastix, or, The Humorous Poet Untrussed_. In the last, he satirized Ben Jonson, with whom he had quarrelled, and who had ridiculed him in _The Poetaster_. In the Honest Whore are found those beautiful lines so often quoted: ... the best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit; The first true gentleman that ever breathed. Extracts from the plays mentioned may be found in Charles Lamb's "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakspeare." CHAPTER XVI. BACON, AND THE RISE OF THE NEW PHILOSOPHY. Birth and Early Life. Treatment of Essex. His Appointments. His Fall. Writes Philosophy. Magna Instauratio. His Defects. His Fame. His Essays. BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE OF BACON. Contemporary with Shakspeare, and almost equal to him in English fame at least, is Francis Bacon, the founder of the system of experimental philosophy in the Elizabethan age. The investigations of the one in the philosophy of human life, were emulated by those of the other in the realm of general nature, in order to find laws to govern further progress, and to evolve order and harmony out of chaos. Bacon was born in London, on the 22d of January, 1560-61, to an enviable social lot. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was for twenty years lord keeper of the great seal, and was eulogized by George Buchanan as "Diu Britannici regni secundum columen." His mother was Anne Cook, a person of remarkable acquirements in language and theology. Francis Bacon was a delicate, attractive, and precocious child, noticed by the great, and kindly called by the queen "her little lord keeper." Ben Jonson refers to this when he writes, at a later day: England's high chancellor, the destined heir In his soft cradle to his father's chair. Thus, in his early childhood, he became accustomed to the forms and grandeur of political power, and the modes by which it was to be striven for.