Your Lordships well know, for you must be conversant in this kind of reading, that you once had before you a man of the highest rank in this country, one of the greatest men of the law and one of the greatest men of the state, a peer of your own body, Lord Macclesfield.  Yet, my Lords, when that peer did but just modestly hint that he had received hard measure from the Commons and their Managers, those Managers thought themselves bound seriatim, one after another, to express the utmost indignation at the charge, in the harshest language that could be used.  Why did they do so?  They knew it was the language that became them.  They lived in an age in which politeness was as well understood and as much cultivated as it is at present; but they knew what they were doing, and they were resolved to use no language but what their ancestors had used, and to suffer no insolence which their ancestors would not have suffered.  We tread in their steps; we pursue their method; we learn of them:  and we shall never learn at any other school.

We know from history and the records of this House, that a Lord Bacon has been before you.  Who is there, that, upon hearing this name, does not instantly recognize everything of genius the most profound, everything of literature the most extensive, everything of discovery the most penetrating, everything of observation on human life the most distinguishing and refined?  All these must be instantly recognized, for they are all inseparably associated with the name of Lord Verulam.  Yet, when this prodigy was brought before your Lordships by the Commons of Great Britain for having permitted his menial servant to receive presents, what was his demeanor?  Did he require his counsel not “to let down the dignity of his defence”?  No.  That Lord Bacon, whose least distinction was, that he was a peer of England, a Lord High Chancellor, and the son of a Lord Keeper, behaved like a man who knew himself, like a man who was conscious of merits of the highest kind, but who was at the same time conscious of having fallen into guilt.  The House of Commons did not spare him.  They brought him to your bar.  They found spots in that sun.  And what, I again ask, was his behavior?  That of contrition, that of humility, that of repentance, that which belongs to the greatest men lapsed and fallen through human infirmity into error.  He did not hurl defiance at the accusations of his country; he bowed himself before it.  Yet, with all his penitence, he could not escape the pursuit of the House of Commons, and the inflexible justice of this Court.  Your Lordships fined him forty thousand pounds, notwithstanding all his merits, notwithstanding his humility, notwithstanding his contrition, notwithstanding the decorum of his behavior, so well suited to a man under the prosecution of the Commons of England before the Peers of England.  You fined him in a sum fully equal to one hundred thousand pounds of the present day; you imprisoned him during the King’s pleasure; and you disqualified him forever from having a seat in this House and any office in this kingdom.  This is the way in which the Commons behaved formerly, and in which your Lordships acted formerly, when no culprit at this bar dared to hurl a recriminatory accusation against his prosecutors, or dared to censure the language in which they expressed their indignation at his crimes.