y of a connected series of events. Yet he has only
treated the history of the first of that line. He furnishes one of the
first examples of exact investigation of details combined with
reflective treatment of history, and has exercised a controlling
influence on the manner and style of writing English history,
especially by the introduction of considerations of law, which play a
great part in his work. The political points of view which are present
to the author are almost more those of the beginning of the
seventeenth than those of the beginning of the sixteenth century. But
these epochs are closely connected with each other. For what Henry VII
established is just what James I, who loved to connect himself
immediately with the former monarch, wished to continue. Bacon was a
staunch defender of the prerogative.

The dispute which arose between Bacon as a lawyer and Edward Coke
deserves notice.

Coke also has a place in literature. His reports are, even at the
present day, known without his name simply as 'The Reports,' and his
'Institutes' is one of the most learned works which this age produced.
It is rather a collection provided with notes, but is instructive and
suggestive from the variety of and the contrast of its contents. Coke
traced the English laws to the remotest antiquity; he considered them
as the common production of the wisest men of earlier ages, and at the
same time as the great inheritance of the English people, and its best
protection against every kind of tyranny, spiritual or temporal. Even
the old Norman French, in which they were to a great extent composed,
he would not part with, for a peculiar meaning attached itself, in his
view, to every word.

On the other hand Bacon as Attorney-General formed the plan of
comprising the common law in a code, by which a limit should be set to
the caprice of the judges, and the private citizen be better assured
of his rights. He thought of revising the Statute-Book, and wished to
erase everything useless, to remove difficulties, and to bring what
was contradictory into harmony.

Bacon's purpose coincided with the idea of a general system of
legislation entertained by the King: he would have preferred the Roman
law to the statute law of England. Coke was a man devoted to the
letter of the law, and was inclined to offer that resistance to the
sovereign which was implied in a strict adherence to the law as it
was. In the conflict that arose the judges, influen