but an orator of power, a writer of fame, whose
advancement to the highest dignities had been welcomed by public
opinion. Four months later he was a convicted criminal, sentenced for
judicial corruption to imprisonment at the King's pleasure, to a fine of
L40,000, and to perpetual incapacity for any public employment.
Vicissitudes of fortune are commonplaces of history. Many a man once
seemingly pinnacled on the top of greatness has "shot from the zenith
like a falling star," and become a proverb of the fickleness of fate.
Some are torn down by the very traits of mind, passion, or temper, which
have raised them: ambition which overleaps itself, rashness which
hazards all on chances it cannot control, vast abilities not great
enough to achieve the impossible. The plunge of Icarus into the sea, the
murder of Caesar, the imprisonment of Coeur de Lion, the abdication of
Napoleon, the apprehension as a criminal of Jefferson Davis, each was a
startling and impressive contrast to the glory which it followed, yet
each was the natural result of causes which lay in the character and
life of the sufferer, and made his story a consistent whole. But the
pathos of Bacon's fall is the sudden moral ruin of a life which had been
built up in honor for sixty years. 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'