SEYMOUR, who was afterwards permitted to return, distinguished himself by his loyalty through three successive reigns, and retained his romantic passion for the lady of his first affections; for he called the daughter he had by his second lady by the ever-beloved name of ARABELLA STUART.

DOMESTIC HISTORY OF SIR EDWARD COKE.

Sir Edward Coke—­or Cook, as now pronounced, and occasionally so written in his own times—­that lord chief-justice whose name the laws of England will preserve—­has shared the fate of his great rival, the Lord Chancellor Bacon; for no hand worthy of their genius has pursued their story.  Bacon, busied with nature, forgot himself.  Coke who was only the greatest of lawyers, reflected with more complacency on himself; for “among those thirty books which he had written with his own hand, most pleasing to himself was a manual which he called Vade Mecum, from whence, at one view, he took a prospect of his life past.”  This manuscript, which Lloyd notices, was among the fifty which, on his death, were seized on by an order of council, but some years after were returned to his heir; and this precious memorial may still be disinterred.[340]

Coke was “the oracle of law,” but, like too many great lawyers, he was so completely one as to have been nothing else.  Coke has said, “the common law is the absolute perfection of all reason;” a dictum which might admit of some ridicule.  Armed with law, he committed acts of injustice; for in how many cases, passion mixing itself with law, summum jus becomes summa injuria.  Official violence brutalised, and political ambition extinguished, every spark of nature in this great lawyer, when he struck at his victims, public or domestic.  His solitary knowledge, perhaps, had deadened his judgment in other studies; and yet his narrow spirit could shrink with jealousy at the celebrity obtained by more liberal pursuits than his own.  The errors of the great are as instructive as their virtues; and the secret history of the outrageous lawyer may have, at least, the merit of novelty although not of panegyric.

Coke, already enriched by his first marriage, combined power with added wealth, in his union with the relict of Sir William Hatton, the sister of Thomas Lord Burleigh.  Family alliance was the policy of that prudent age of political interests.  Bacon and Cecil married two sisters; Walsingham and Mildmay two others; Knowles, Essex, and Leicester, were linked by family alliances.  Elizabeth, who never designed to marry herself, was anxious to intermarry her court dependents, and to dispose of them so as to secure their services by family interests.[341] Ambition and avarice, which had instigated Coke to form this alliance, punished their creature, by mating him with a spirit haughty and intractable as his own.  It is a remarkable fact, connected with the character of Coke, that this great lawyer suffered his second marriage to take