"All the valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a single shelf"-- imagine it! The few existing books were in the Latin tongue mainly.

"A person who was ignorant of it was shut out from all acquaintance--not merely with Cicero and Virgil, but with the most interesting memoirs, state papers, and pamphlets of his own time"-- a literature necessary to the Stratford lad, for his fictitious reputation's sake, since the writer of his Works would begin to use it wholesale and in a most masterly way before the lad was hardly more than out of his teens and into his twenties.
At fifteen Bacon was sent to the university, and he spent three years there.

Thence he went to Paris in the train of the English Ambassador, and there he mingled daily with the wise, the cultured, the great, and the aristocracy of fashion, during another three years.

A total of six years spent at the sources of knowledge; knowledge both of books and of men.

The three spent at the university were coeval with the second and last three spent by the little Stratford lad at Stratford school supposedly, and perhapsedly, and maybe, and by inference--with nothing to infer from.