ly his powerful
and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and
government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena;
he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to
the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a
lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyond
his hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, to become
powerful by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the
service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in mediating
between jealous parties and dangerous claims. And he liked to enter into
the humours of a Court; to devote his brilliant imagination and
affluence of invention either to devising a pageant which should throw
all others into the shade, or a compromise which should get great
persons out of some difficulty of temper or pique.

In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, as calmly
persevering and tenacious, as he was in his pursuit of his philosophical
speculations. He was a compound of the most adventurous and most
diversified ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we
commonly associate with moderate desires and the love of retirement and
an easy life. To imagine and dare anything, and never to let go the
object of his pursuit, is one side of him; on the other he is
obsequiously desirous to please and fearful of giving offence, the
humblest and most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors,
ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, which yet it
was not safe to provoke by ill offices and the wish to thwart him. He
never misses a chance of proffering his services; he never lets pass an
opportunity of recommending himself to those who could help him. He is
so bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense of incongruity when we
see him engaging in politics as if he had no other interest. He throws
himself with such zest into the language of the moralist, the
theologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the author
of a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler of
tables of natural history. When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer.
If he had not been the author of the _Instauratio_, his life would not
have looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd and
supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and who
unscrupulously pushed their way to preferment. He