He chose to please man, and not to follow what his soul must have told him was the better way.

He wanted, in his dealings with men, that sincerity on which he insisted so strongly in his dealings with nature and knowledge.

And the ruin of a great life was the consequence.
Francis Bacon was born in London on the 22d of January, 1560/61, three years before Galileo.

He was born at York House, in the Strand; the house which, though it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had been lately tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, in which Bacon himself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, and which passed after his fall into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark in the Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the garden of the Thames Embankment.

His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's first Lord Keeper, the fragment of whose effigy in the Crypt of St.
Paul's is one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire.
His uncle by marriage was that William Cecil who was to be Lord Burghley.