This letter reveals the secret of Bacon’s life, and all that we know of him, read in the light of it, forms a consistent and harmonious whole.  He was possessed by his vast scheme, for a reformation of the intellectual world, and through it, of the world of human experience, as fully as was ever apostle by his faith.  Implicitly believing in his own ability to accomplish it, at least in its grand outlines, and to leave at his death the community of mind at work, by the method and for the purposes which he had defined, with the perfection of all science in full view, he subordinated every other ambition to this; and in seeking and enjoying place, power, and wealth, still regarded them mainly as aids in prosecuting his master purpose, and in introducing it to the world.  With this clearly in mind, it is easy to understand his subsequent career.  Its external details may be read in any of the score of biographies which writers of all grades of merit and demerit have devoted to him, and there is no space for them here.  For our purpose it is necessary to refer only to the principal crises in his public life.

Until the death of Elizabeth, Bacon had no place in the royal service worthy of his abilities as a lawyer.  Many who, even in the narrowest professional sense, were far inferior to him, were preferred before him.  Yet he obtained a position recognized by all, and second only in legal learning to his lifelong rival and constant adversary, Sir Edward Coke.  To-day, it is probable that if the two greatest names in the history of the common law were to be selected by the suffrages of the profession, the great majority would be cast for Coke and Bacon.  As a master of the intricacies of precedent and an authority upon the detailed formulas of “the perfection of reason,” the former is unrivaled still; but in the comprehensive grasp of the law as a system for the maintenance of social order and the protection of individual rights, Bacon rose far above him.  The cherished aim of his professional career was to survey the whole body of the laws of England, to produce a digest of them which should result in a harmonious code, to do away with all that was found obsolete or inconsistent with the principles of the system, and thus to adapt the living, progressive body of the law to the wants of the growing nation.  This magnificent plan was beyond the power of any one man, had his life no other task, but he suggested the method and the aim; and while for six generations after these legal giants passed away, the minute, accurate, and profound learning of Coke remained the acknowledged chief storehouse of British traditional jurisprudence, the seventh generation took up the work of revision and reform, and from the time of Bentham and Austin the progress of legal science has been toward codification.  The contest between the aggregation of empirical rules and formulated customs which Coke taught as the common law, and the broad, harmonious application of scientific reason to the definition and enforcement of rights, still goes on; but with constant gains on the side of the reformers, all of whom with one consent confess that no general and complete reconstruction of legal doctrine as a science is possible, except upon the lines laid down by Bacon.