Aubrey in his laboriously compiled _Short Lives_, in which he shows a friendly and admiring attitude toward Bacon, definitely states that he was a pederast.

Aubrey was only a careful gleaner of frequently authentic gossip, but a similar statement is made by Sir Simonds D'Ewes in his _Autobiography_.

D'Ewes, whose family belonged to the same part of Suffolk as Bacon's sprang from, was not friendly to Bacon, but that fact will not suffice to account for his statement.

He was an upright and honorable man of scholarly habits, and, moreover, a trained lawyer, who had many opportunities of obtaining first-hand information, for he had lived in the Chancery office from childhood.

He is very precise as to Bacon's homosexual practices with his own servants, both before and after his fall, and even gives the name of a "very effeminate-faced youth" who was his "catamite and bedfellow"; he states, further, that there had been some question of bringing Bacon to trial for sodomy.