The promise that Bacon should have the place came to him three days afterwards through Villiers.  He acknowledged it in a burst of gratitude (Feb. 15, 1615/16).  “I will now wholly rely on your excellent and happy self....  I am yours surer to you than my own life.  For, as they speak of the Turquoise stone in a ring, I will break into twenty pieces before you bear the least fall.”  They were unconsciously prophetic words.  But Ellesmere lasted longer than was expected.  It was not till a year after this promise that he resigned.  On the 7th of March, 1616/17, Bacon received the seals.  He expresses his obligations to Villiers, now Lord Buckingham, in the following letter: 

“MY DEAREST LORD,—­It is both in cares and kindness that small ones float up to the tongue, and great ones sink down into the heart with silence.  Therefore I could speak little to your Lordship to-day, neither had I fit time; but I must profess thus much, that in this day’s work you are the truest and perfectest mirror and example of firm and generous friendship that ever was in court.  And I shall count every day lost, wherein I shall not either study your well-doing in thought, or do your name honour in speech, or perform you service in deed.  Good my Lord, account and accept me your most bounden and devoted friend and servant of all men living,

     “March 7, 1616 (i.e. 1616/1617). 
     FR. BACON, C.S.”

He himself believed the appointment to be a popular one.  “I know I am come in,” he writes to the King soon after, “with as strong an envy of some particulars as with the love of the general.”  On the 7th of May, 1617, he took his seat in Chancery with unusual pomp and magnificence, and set forth, in an opening speech, with all his dignity and force, the duties of his great office and his sense of their obligation.  But there was a curious hesitation in treating him as other men were treated in like cases.  He was only “Lord Keeper.”  It was not till the following January (1617/18) that he received the office of Lord Chancellor.  It was not till half a year afterwards that he was made a Peer.  Then he became Baron Verulam (July, 1618), and in January, 1620/21, Viscount St. Alban’s.

From this time Bacon must be thought of, first and foremost, as a Judge in the great seat which he had so earnestly sought.  It was the place not merely of law, which often tied the judge’s hands painfully, but of true justice, when law failed to give it.  Bacon’s ideas of the duties of a judge were clear and strong, as he showed in various admirable speeches and charges:  his duties as regards his own conduct and reputation; his duties in keeping his subordinates free from the taint of corruption.  He was not ignorant of the subtle and unacknowledged ways in which unlawful gains may be covered by custom, and an abuse goes on because men will not choose to look at it.  He entered on his office with the full purpose of doing its work better than it had