An intellect of the first rank, which from boyhood to old age had been steadfast in the pursuit of truth and in the noblest services to mankind, which in a feeble body had been sustained in vigor by all the virtues of prudence and self-reverence; a genial nature, winning the affection and admiration of associates, hardly paralleled in the industry with which its energies were devoted to useful work, a soul exceptional among its contemporaries for piety and philanthropy—­this man is represented to us by popular writers as having habitually sold justice for money, and as having become in office “the meanest of mankind.”

But this picture, as so often drawn, and as seemingly fixed in the popular mind, is not only impossible, but is demonstrably false.  To review all the facts which correct it in detail would lead us far beyond our limits.  It must suffice to refer to the great work of Spedding, in which the entire records of the case are found, and which would long ago have made the world just to Bacon’s fame, but that the author’s comment on his own complete and fair record is itself partial and extravagant.  But the materials for a final judgment are accessible to all in Spedding’s volumes, and a candid reading of them solves the enigma.  Bacon was condemned without a trial, on his own confession, and this confession was consistent with the tenor of his life.  Its substance was that he had failed to put a stop effectually to the immemorial custom in his court of receiving presents from suitors, but that he had never deviated from justice in his decrees.  There was no instance in which he was accused of yielding to the influence of gifts, or passing judgment for a bribe.  No act of his as Chancellor was impeached as illegal, or reversed as corrupt.  Suitors complained that they had sent sums of money or valuable presents to his court, and had been disappointed in the result; but no one complained of injustice in a decision.  Bacon was a conspicuous member of the royal party; and when the storm of popular fury broke in Parliament upon the court, the King and the ministry abandoned him.  He had stood all his life upon the royal favor as the basis of his strength and hope; and when it was gone from under him, he sank helplessly, and refused to attempt a defense.  But he still in his humiliation found comfort in the reflection that his ruin would put an end to “anything that is in the likeness of corruption” among the judges.  And he wrote, in the hour of his deepest distress, that he had been “the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes that have been since Sir Nicholas Bacon’s time.”  Nor did any man of his time venture to contradict him, when in later years he summed up his case in the words, “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.”