Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/63

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INTRODUCTION

colored busts in terra cotta representing Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, and their son Francis, as a boy of about twelve. The workmanship is Italian, and by the same hand, and of a high degree of artistic excellence. From the age of the boy the busts must have been made about the year 1572. The boy's bust is especially interesting, because seen beside the busts of his father and mother, it shows that Francis Bacon's likeness was to his mother. The frontispiece of Vol. XI of James Spedding's The Works of Francis Bacon is an engraving from a drawing of the bust of Bacon done in profile.

The next portrait is a miniature made by Nicholas Hilliard, in 1578, when Bacon was living in Paris in the household of Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador. Nicholas Hilliard is the artist of whom John Donne wrote in his poem, The Storm,—

"a hand or eye
By Hilliard drawn is worth a history
By a coarse painter made."

Mr. Spedding describes the Hilliard miniature as "a work of exquisite beauty and delicacy." An engraving of it was made for Basil Montagu's, The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, 1825—1834, whose notice in The Edinburgh Review, for July, 1837, is T. B. Macaulay's celebrated essay on Lord Bacon. The Hilliard miniature was at that time in the possession of John Adair Hawkins.

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