who venerated him--men whom Bacon viewed with mingled contempt
and apprehension both in the courts and in Parliament where they were
numerous, and whom he more than once advised the King to bridle and keep
"in awe." Bacon presented his scheme to the King in a Proposition, or,
as we should call it, a Report. It is very able and interesting; marked
with his characteristic comprehensiveness and sense of practical needs,
and with a confidence in his own knowledge of law which contrasts
curiously with the current opinion about it. He speaks with the utmost
honour of Coke's work, but he is not afraid of a comparison with him. "I
do assure your Majesty," he says, "I am in good hope that when Sir
Edward Coke's Reports and my Rules and Decisions shall come to
posterity, there will be (whatever is now thought) question who was the
greater lawyer." But the project, though it was entertained and
discussed in Parliament, came to nothing. No one really cared about it
except Bacon.

But in these years (1615 and 1616) two things happened of the utmost
consequence to him. One was the rise, more extravagant than anything
that England had seen for centuries, and in the end more fatal, of the
new favourite, who from plain George Villiers became the all-powerful
Duke of Buckingham. Bacon, like the rest of the world, saw the necessity
of bowing before him; and Bacon persuaded himself that Villiers was
pre-eminently endowed with all the gifts and virtues which a man in his
place would need. We have a series of his letters to Villiers; they are
of course in the complimentary vein which was expected; but if their
language is only compliment, there is no language left for expressing
what a man wishes to be taken for truth. The other matter was the
humiliation, by Bacon's means and in his presence, of his old rival
Coke. In the dispute about jurisdiction, always slumbering and lately
awakened and aggravated by Coke, between the Common Law Courts and the
Chancery, Coke had threatened the Chancery with Praemunire. The King's
jealousy took alarm, and the Chief-Justice was called before the
Council. There a decree, based on Bacon's advice and probably drawn up
by him, peremptorily overruled the legal doctrine maintained by the
greatest and most self-confident judge whom the English courts had seen.
The Chief-Justice had to acquiesce in this reading of the law; and then,
as if such an affront were not enough, Coke was suspended from his
office, and,