s volumes, and a candid reading of them solves the enigma.
Bacon was condemned without a trial, on his own confession, and this
confession was consistent with the tenor of his life. Its substance was
that he had failed to put a stop effectually to the immemorial custom
in his court of receiving presents from suitors, but that he had never
deviated from justice in his decrees. There was no instance in which he
was accused of yielding to the influence of gifts, or passing judgment
for a bribe. No act of his as Chancellor was impeached as illegal, or
reversed as corrupt. Suitors complained that they had sent sums of money
or valuable presents to his court, and had been disappointed in the
result; but no one complained of injustice in a decision. Bacon was a
conspicuous member of the royal party; and when the storm of popular
fury broke in Parliament upon the court, the King and the ministry
abandoned him. He had stood all his life upon the royal favor as the
basis of his strength and hope; and when it was gone from under him, he
sank helplessly, and refused to attempt a defense. But he still in his
humiliation found comfort in the reflection that his ruin would put an
end to "anything that is in the likeness of corruption" among the
judges. And he wrote, in the hour of his deepest distress, that he had
been "the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes that
have been since Sir Nicholas Bacon's time." Nor did any man of his time
venture to contradict him, when in later years he summed up his case in
the words, "I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty
years. But it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two
hundred years."

No revolution of modern times has been more complete than that which the
last two centuries have silently wrought in the customary morality of
British public life, and in the standards by which it is judged. Under
James I. every office of state was held as the private property of its
occupant. The highest places in the government were conferred only on
condition of large payments to the King. He openly sold the honors and
dignities of which he was the source. "The making of a baron," that is,
the right to sell to some rich plebeian a patent of nobility, was a
common grant to favorites, and was actually bestowed on Bacon, to aid
him in maintaining the state of his office. We have the testimony of
James himself that all the lawyers, of whom the judges of the realm w