service he brought up the large arrears of business, tried every cause, heard every petition, and acquired a splendid reputation as an upright and diligent judge.  But Buckingham was his evil angel.  He was without sense of the sanctity of the judicial character; and regarded the bench, like every other public office, as an instrument of his own interests and will.  On the other hand, to Bacon the voice of Buckingham was the voice of the King, and he had been taught from infancy as the beginning of his political creed that the king can do no wrong.  Buckingham began at once to solicit from Bacon favors for his friends and dependants, and the Chancellor was weak enough to listen and to answer him.  There is no evidence that in any one instance the favorite asked for the violation of law or the perversion of justice; much less that Bacon would or did accede to such a request.  But the Duke demanded for one suitor a speedy hearing, for another a consideration of facts which might not be in evidence, for a third all the favor consistent with law; and Bacon reported to him the result, and how far he had been able to oblige him.  This persistent tampering with the source of justice was a disturbing influence in the Chancellor’s court, and unquestionably lowered the dignity of his attitude and weakened his judicial conscience.

Notwithstanding this, when the Lord Chancellor opened the Parliament in January, 1621, with a speech in praise of his King and in honor of the nation, he seemed to be at the summit of earthly prosperity.  No voice had been lifted to question his purity and worth.  He was the friend of the King, one of the chief supports of the throne, a champion indeed of high prerogative, but an orator of power, a writer of fame, whose advancement to the highest dignities had been welcomed by public opinion.  Four months later he was a convicted criminal, sentenced for judicial corruption to imprisonment at the King’s pleasure, to a fine of L40,000, and to perpetual incapacity for any public employment.  Vicissitudes of fortune are commonplaces of history.  Many a man once seemingly pinnacled on the top of greatness has “shot from the zenith like a falling star,” and become a proverb of the fickleness of fate.  Some are torn down by the very traits of mind, passion, or temper, which have raised them:  ambition which overleaps itself, rashness which hazards all on chances it cannot control, vast abilities not great enough to achieve the impossible.  The plunge of Icarus into the sea, the murder of Caesar, the imprisonment of Coeur de Lion, the abdication of Napoleon, the apprehension as a criminal of Jefferson Davis, each was a startling and impressive contrast to the glory which it followed, yet each was the natural result of causes which lay in the character and life of the sufferer, and made his story a consistent whole.  But the pathos of Bacon’s fall is the sudden moral ruin of a life which had been built up in honor for sixty years.