to generalise in shrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams.  He liked to apply his powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena; he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it.  It was not beyond his hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, to become powerful by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in mediating between jealous parties and dangerous claims.  And he liked to enter into the humours of a Court; to devote his brilliant imagination and affluence of invention either to devising a pageant which should throw all others into the shade, or a compromise which should get great persons out of some difficulty of temper or pique.

In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, as calmly persevering and tenacious, as he was in his pursuit of his philosophical speculations.  He was a compound of the most adventurous and most diversified ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we commonly associate with moderate desires and the love of retirement and an easy life.  To imagine and dare anything, and never to let go the object of his pursuit, is one side of him; on the other he is obsequiously desirous to please and fearful of giving offence, the humblest and most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors, ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, which yet it was not safe to provoke by ill offices and the wish to thwart him.  He never misses a chance of proffering his services; he never lets pass an opportunity of recommending himself to those who could help him.  He is so bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense of incongruity when we see him engaging in politics as if he had no other interest.  He throws himself with such zest into the language of the moralist, the theologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the author of a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler of tables of natural history.  When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer.  If he had not been the author of the Instauratio, his life would not have looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd and supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and who unscrupulously pushed their way to preferment.  He claimed to be, in spite of the misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as devoted to public work and as capable of it as any of them.  He was ready for anything, for any amount of business, ready, as in everything, to take infinite trouble about it.  The law, if he did not like it, was yet no by-work with him; he was as truly ambitious as the men with whom he maintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a rivalry.  He felt bitterly