profuseness of giving.  And Bacon let it be.  He asked no questions; he knew that he worked hard and well; he knew that it could go on without affecting his purpose to do justice “from the greatest to the groom.”  A stronger character, a keener conscience, would have faced the question, not only whether he was not setting the most ruinous of precedents, but whether any man could be so sure of himself as to go on dealing justly with gifts in his hands.  But Bacon, who never dared to face the question, what James was, what Buckingham was, let himself be spellbound by custom.  He knew in the abstract that judges ought to have nothing to do with gifts, and had said so impressively in his charges to them.  Yet he went on self-complacent, secure, almost innocent, building up a great tradition of corruption in the very heart of English justice, till the challenge of Parliament, which began in him its terrible and relentless, but most unequal, prosecution of justice against ministers who had betrayed the commonwealth in serving the Crown, woke him from his dream, and made him see, as others saw it, the guilt of a great judge who, under whatever extenuating pretext, allowed the suspicion to arise that he might sell justice.  “In the midst of a state of as great affliction as mortal man can endure,” he wrote to the Lords of the Parliament, in making his submission, “I shall begin with the professing gladness in some things.  The first is that hereafter the greatness of a judge or magistrate shall be no sanctuary or protection of guiltiness, which is the beginning of a golden world.  The next, that after this example it is like that judges will fly from anything that is in the likeness of corruption as from a serpent.”  Bacon’s own judgment on himself, deliberately repeated, is characteristic, and probably comes near the truth.  “Howsoever, I acknowledge the sentence just and for reformation’s sake fit,” he writes to Buckingham from the Tower, where, for form’s sake, he was imprisoned for a few miserable days, he yet had been “the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes that have been since Sir Nicolas Bacon’s time.”  He repeated the same thing yet more deliberately in later times. “I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years.  But it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred years.”

He might have gone on to add, “the Wisest Counsellor; and yet none on whom rested heavier blame; none of whom England might more justly complain.”  Good counsels given, submissive acquiescence in the worst—­this is the history of his statesmanship.  Bacon, whose eye was everywhere, was not sparing of his counsels.  On all the great questions of the time he has left behind abundant evidence, not only of what he thought, but of what he advised.  And in every case these memorials are marked with the insight, the independence, the breadth of view, and the moderation of a mind which is bent on truth.  He started, of course, from a basis which we are now