where they were numerous, and whom he more than once advised the King to bridle and keep “in awe.”  Bacon presented his scheme to the King in a Proposition, or, as we should call it, a Report.  It is very able and interesting; marked with his characteristic comprehensiveness and sense of practical needs, and with a confidence in his own knowledge of law which contrasts curiously with the current opinion about it.  He speaks with the utmost honour of Coke’s work, but he is not afraid of a comparison with him.  “I do assure your Majesty,” he says, “I am in good hope that when Sir Edward Coke’s Reports and my Rules and Decisions shall come to posterity, there will be (whatever is now thought) question who was the greater lawyer.”  But the project, though it was entertained and discussed in Parliament, came to nothing.  No one really cared about it except Bacon.

But in these years (1615 and 1616) two things happened of the utmost consequence to him.  One was the rise, more extravagant than anything that England had seen for centuries, and in the end more fatal, of the new favourite, who from plain George Villiers became the all-powerful Duke of Buckingham.  Bacon, like the rest of the world, saw the necessity of bowing before him; and Bacon persuaded himself that Villiers was pre-eminently endowed with all the gifts and virtues which a man in his place would need.  We have a series of his letters to Villiers; they are of course in the complimentary vein which was expected; but if their language is only compliment, there is no language left for expressing what a man wishes to be taken for truth.  The other matter was the humiliation, by Bacon’s means and in his presence, of his old rival Coke.  In the dispute about jurisdiction, always slumbering and lately awakened and aggravated by Coke, between the Common Law Courts and the Chancery, Coke had threatened the Chancery with Praemunire.  The King’s jealousy took alarm, and the Chief-Justice was called before the Council.  There a decree, based on Bacon’s advice and probably drawn up by him, peremptorily overruled the legal doctrine maintained by the greatest and most self-confident judge whom the English courts had seen.  The Chief-Justice had to acquiesce in this reading of the law; and then, as if such an affront were not enough, Coke was suspended from his office, and, further, enjoined to review and amend his published reports, where they were inconsistent with the view of law which on Bacon’s authority the Star Chamber had adopted (June, 1616).  This he affected to do, but the corrections were manifestly only colourable; his explanations of his legal heresies against the prerogative, as these heresies were formulated by the Chancellor and Bacon, and presented to him for recantation, were judged insufficient; and in a decree, prefaced by reasons drawn up by Bacon, in which, besides Coke’s errors of law, his “deceit, contempt, and slander of the Government,” his “perpetual turbulent carriage,” and his