Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

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70 FBANCIS BACON
Bacon compared favourably with Coke.
" Some of the judges, and amongst them Egerton, wished to
make Bacon Attorney-General, for the great common-lawyer, if
a giant in legal erudition, had the manners of a bully, and the
spirit of a slave. In the long succession of English judges, it is
doubtful whether any one has left on the bench so distinct an
impression of having been a cold, harsh, brawling, ungenerous
man as Coke," etc., etc. (H3p worth Dixon, 79-80.)
" Wanting the warmth of heart, the large round of sympathies,
which enabled his rival at the bar to see into political questions
with the eye of a poet and a statesman, Coke could only treat a
constituted court as a thing of words, dates, readings, and
decisions, not as a living fact in close relation to other living
facts, and having in itself the germs of growth and change.
(lb. 231.) See Speddicg, Let. and Life, i. 232.
An inequitable judge— His judgments questioned.
" Unhappily he was employed in perverting laws to the vilest
purposes of tyranny. " (Macaulay, 330.)
" He did worse than nothing in politics. He degraded himself,
he injured his country and posterity by tarnishing the honourable
traditions of the bench." (Abbott, int. to Essays,
xcvi. And see, by the same, " Francis Bacon, " pp. xx, xxi, xxix.)
An equitable judge — His judgments neither questioned nor
reversed.
" His favourites took bribes, but his Lordship always gave
judgment secundum cequum et bonum. His decrees in chancery
stand flrme; there are fewer of his decrees reverst than of any
other Chancellor." (John Aubrey, Sped. L. L. vii. 557.)
" A most indefatigable servant to the King, and a most
earnest lover of the public. " (Sir Tobie Matthew.)
•' Bacon was the first of a new order of public men. . . . Bad men
kill offices and good men found them." (See Hepworth Dixon's
Story, p. 210, etc. See also Lord Chief Justice Hale on the
Jurisdiction of the Lords' House, 1716.)