laces, theatres, bridges, making noble roads, cutting canals, granting multitude of charters and liberties for comfort of decayed companies and corporations: the foundation of colleges and lectures for learning and the education of youth; foundations and institutions of orders and fraternities for nobility, enterprise, and obedience; but, above all, the establishing good laws for the regulation of the kingdom and as an example to the world." He was a permanent reformer.-He knew that wise reform, instead of palliating a complaint, looks at the real cause of the malady. He concurred with his opponent, Sir Edward Coke, in saying, "Si quid moves a principio moveas. Errores ad principia referre est refellere." His opinion was, that he "who, in the cure of politic or of natural disorders, shall rest himself contented with second causes, without setting forth in diligent travel to search for the original source of evil, doth resemble the slothful husbandman, who moweth down the heads of noisome weeds, when he should carefully pull up the roots; and the work shall ever be to do again." Cautious, gradual, permanent reform, from the love of excellence, is ever in the train of knowledge. They are the tests of a true reformer. Such were the principles which he carried into law and into politics. As a lawyer, he looked with micrescopic eye into its subtleties, and soon made great proficience in the science. He was active in the discharge of his professional duties: and published various works upon different parts of the law. In his offices of solicitor and attorney-general, "when he was called, as he was of the king's council learned, to charge any offenders, either in criminals or capitals, he was never of an insulting and domineering nature over them, but always tenderhearted, and carrying himself decently towards the parties, though it was his duty to charge them home, but yet as one that looked upon the example with the eye of severity, but upon the person with the eye of pity and compassion." As a judge, it has never been pretended that any decree made by him was ever reversed as unjust. As a patron of preferment, his favourite maxim was, "Detur digniori, qui beneficium digno dat omnes obligat." As a statesman, he was indefatigable in his public exertions. "Men think," he said, "I cannot continue if I should thus oppress myself with business; but my account is made. The duties of life are more than life; and if I die now, I shall die before the world is weary of me, which in our times is somewhat rare." His love of reform, his master passion, maniested itself both as a statesman and as a lawyer; but, before he attempted any change, he, with his usual caution, said, "There is a great difference between arts and civil affairs; arts and sciences should be like mines, resounding on all sides with new works, and further progress: but it is not good to try experiments in states, except the necessity be urgent or the utility evident; and well to beware that it is the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation." The desire to change he always regarded with great jealousy. He knew that in its worst form it is the tool by which demagogues delude and mislead; and in its best form, when it originates in benevolence and a love of truth, it is a passion by which kind intention has rushed on with such fearless impetuosity, and wisdom been hurried into such lamentable excess: it is so nearly allied to a contempt of authority, and so frequently accompanied by a presumptuous confidence in private judgment: a dislike of all established forms, merely because they are established, and of the old paths, merely because they are old: it has such tendency to go too far rather than not far enough; that this great man, conscious of the blessings of society, and of the many perplexities which accompany even the most beneficial alterations, always looked with suspicion upon a love of change, whether it existed in himself or in others. In his advice to Sir George Villiers he said," Merit the admonition of the wisest of men: My son, fear God and the king, and meddle not with those who are given to change."" As a statesman his first wish was, in the true spirit of his philosophy, to preserve; the next, to improve the constitution in church and state. In his endeavours to improve England and Scotland he was indefatigable and successful. He had no sooner succeeded than he immediately raised his voice for oppressed Ireland, with an earnestness which shows how deeply he felt for her sufferings. "Your majesty," he said, “accepted my poor field-fruits touching the union, but let me assure you that England, Scotland, and Ireland, well united, will be a trefoil worthy to be worn in your crown. She is blessed with all the dowries of nature, and with a race of generous and noble people; but the hand of man does not unite with the hand of nature. The harp of Ireland is not strung to concord. It is not attuned with the harp of David in casting out the evil spirit of superstition, or the harp of Orpheus in casting out desolation and barbarism." In these reforms he acted with his usual caution. He looked about him to discover the straight and right way, and so to walk in it. He stood on such an eminence, that his eye rested not upon small parts, but comprehended the whole. He stood on the ancient way. He saw this happy country, the mansion-house of liberty. He saw the order and beauty of her sacred buildings, the learning and piety of her priests, the sweet repose and holy quiet of her decent Sabbaths, and that best sacrifice of humble and simple devotion, more acceptable the senseless yells by which he was vilified, went right onward in the improvement of law, the advancement of knowledge, and the diffusion of charity. Such were Bacon's public exertions.-In private life he was always cheerful and often playful, according to his own favourite maxim, "To be free-minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat, and of sleep, and of exercise, is one of the best precepts of long lasting." than the fire of the temple, which went not out by ❘ of that illustrious statesman, who, regardless of day or by night. He saw it in the loveliness of his own beautiful description of the blessings of government. "In Orpheus's theatre all beasts and birds assembled, and, forgetting their several appetites, some of prey, some of game, some of quarrel, stood all sociably together, listening to the airs and accords of the harp, the sound whereof no sooner ceased, or was drowned by some louder noise, but every beast returned to his own nature; wherein is aptly described the nature and condition of men who are full of savage and unreclaimed desires of profit, of lust, of revenge, which as long as they give ear to precepts, to laws, to religion, sweetly touched with eloquence, and persuasion of books, of sermons, of harangues, so long is society and peace maintained; but if these instruments be silent, or sedition and tumult make them not audible, all things dissolve into anarchy and confusion." In gradual reform of the law, his exertions were indefatigable. He suggested improvements both of the civil and criminal law: he proposed to reduce and compile the whole law; and in a tract upon universal justice, "Leges Legum," he planted a seed which, for the last two centuries, has not been dormant, and is now just appearing above the surface. He was thus attentive to the ultimate and to the immediate improvement of the law: the ultimate improvement depending upon the progress of knowledge. "Veritas temporis filia dicitur, non authoritatis:" the immediate improvement upon the knowledge by its professors in power, of the local law, the principles of legislation, and general science. So this must ever be. Knowledge cannot exist without the love of improvement. The French chancellors, D'Aguesseau and L'Hôpital, were unwearied in their exertions to improve the law; and three works upon imaginary governments, the Utopia, the Atlantis, and the Armata, were written by English chancellors. So Sir William Grant, the reserved, intellectual master of the rolls, struck at the root of sanguinary punishment, when, in the true spirit of philosophy, he said, "Crime is prevented, not by fear, but by recoiling from the act with horror, which is generated by the union of law, morals, and religion. With us they do not unite; and our laws are a dead letter." So, too, by the exertions of the philosophic and benevolent Sir Samuel Romilly, who was animated by a spirit public as nature, and not terminated in any private design, the criminal law has been purified; and, instead of monthly massacres of young men and women, we, in our noble times, have lately read that "there has not been one execution in London during the present shrievalty."-With what joy, with what grateful remembrance has this been read by the many friends The art of conversation, that social mode of diffusing kindness and knowledge, he considered to be one of the valuable arts of life, and all that he taught he skilfully and gracefully practised. When he spoke, the hearers only feared that he should be silent, yet he was more pleased to listen than to speak, "glad to light his torch at any man's candle." He was skilful in alluring his company to discourse upon subjects in which they were most conversant. He was ever happy to commend, and unwilling to censure; and when he could not assent to an opinion, he would set forth its ingenuity, and so grace and adorn it by his own luminous statement, that his opponent could not feel lowered by his defeat. His wit was brilliant, and when it flashed upon any subject, it was never with ill-nature, which, like the crackling of thorns, ending in sudden darkness, is only fit for a fool's laughter; the sparkling of his wit was that of the precious diamond, valuable for its worth and weight, denoting the riches of the mine. He had not any children; but, says Dr. Rawley, "the want of children did not detract from his good usage of his consort during the intermarriage, whom he prosecuted with much conjugal love and respect, with many rich gifts and endowments, besides a robe of honour which he invested her withal, which she wore until her dying day, being twenty years and more after his death." He was religious, and died in the faith estatablished in the church of England. Bacon has been accused of servility, of dissimulation, of various base motives, and their filthy brood of base actions, all unworthy of his high birth, and incompatible with his great wisdom, and the estimation in which he was held by the noblest spirits of the age. It is true that there were men in his own time, and will be men in all times; who are better pleased to count spots in the sun than to rejoice in its glorious brightness. Such men have openly libelled him, like Dewes and Weldon, whose falsehoods were detected as soon as uttered, or have fastened upon certain ceremonious compliments and dedications, the fashion of his day, as a sample of his servility, passing over his noble letters to the queen, his lofty contempt for the Lord Keeper Puckering, his open dealing with Sir Robert Cecil, and with others, who, powerful when he was nothing, might have blighted his opening fortunes forever, forgetting his advocacy of the rights of the people in the face of the court, and the true and honest counsels, always given by him, in times of great difficulty, both to Elizabeth and her successor. When was a "base sycophant" loved and honoured by piety such as that of Herbert, Tenison, and Rawley, by noble spirits like Hobbes, Ben Jonson, and Selden, or followed to the grave, and beyond it, with devoted affection, such as that of Sir Thomas Meautys. Forced by the narrowness of his fortune into business, conscious of his own powers, aware of the peculiar quality of his mind, and disliking his pursuits, his heart was often in his study, while he lent his person to the robes of office; and he was culpably unmindful of the conduct of his servants, who amassed wealth meanly and rapaciously, while their careless master, himself always poor, with his thoughts on higher ventures, never stopped to inquire by what methods they grew rich. No man can act thus with impunity; he has sullied the brightness of a name which ought never to have been heard without reverence, injured his own fame, and has been himself the victim upon the altar which he raised to true science; becoming a theme to "point a moral or adorn a tale," in an attempt to unite philosophy and politics, an idol, whose golden head and hands of base metal form a monster more hideous than the Dagon of the Philistines. His consciousness of the wanderings of his mind made him run into affairs with over-acted zeal and a variety of useless subtleties; and in lending himself to matters immeasurably beneath him, he sometimes stooped too low. A man often receives an unfortunate bias from an unjust censure. Bacon, who was said by Elizabeth to be without knowledge of affairs, and by Cecil and Burleigh to be unfit for business, affected through the whole of his life an over-refinement in trifles, and a political subtlety unworthy of so great a mind: it is also true that he sometimes seemed conscious of the pleasure of skill, and that he who possessed the dangerous power of "working and winding" others to his purpose, tried it upon the little men whom his heart disdained; but that heart was neither "cloven nor double." There is no record that he abused the influence which he possessed over the minds of all men. He ever gave honest counsel to his capricious mistress, and her pedantic successor; to the rash, turbulent Essex, and to the wily, avaricious Buckingham. There is nothing more lamentable in the annals of mankind than that false position, which placed one of the greatest minds England ever possessed at the mercy of a mean king and a base court favourite. |