oble
race, his fall also was more fatal and ignominious. Both represent to
our minds distinct forms of undoubted greatness. _The Body of the Common
Law of England_ is the type that speaks for Coke. The glory of human
wisdom shines forever around the drooping head of Bacon. Both teach
posterity how much intellectual grandeur may co-exist with the most
glaring moral turpitude; both pay homage to virtue by seeking refuge in
disgrace in the tranquil pursuits that have since immortalized them.
Bacon, with a genius only less than angelic, condescends to paltry
crime, and dies branded. Coke, with a profound contempt for the arts
that Bacon loved, enraged by disappointment, takes revenge for neglect,
and dies a patriot. In the days of Coke there would seem to have been a
general understanding on the part of royal sycophants to mislead the
monarch, and all became his sycophants who received his favors. Coke is
no exception to the rule. It is true enough that to him we are mainly
indebted for the movement which, beginning on the 30th of January, 1621,
ended that very day eight-and-twenty years with the decapitation of the
king; but it is likewise undeniable that the nation's difficulties would
have waited some time longer for solution had not the defender of the
people's rights been inoculated with a love of liberty by the sudden
application of the royal lancet, whose sharp edge his judicious
self-love would never have provoked. Coke was born in what a Royalist of
the days of Charles the First might well have called "the good old
times," when Queens were gentle despots and Parliaments the most devoted
of self-constituted slaves; when Mr. Speaker "upon his allegiance was
commanded, if a certain bill be exhibited, not to read it," and when
"Mr. Vice-Chamberlain, to the great comfort of the Speaker and the
House, brought answer of Her Majesty's acceptance of the submission" of
legislators who had presumed to speak of matters "not proper and
pertinent for the house to deal in." Elizabeth was on her splendid
throne when Coke, having quitted the University of Cambridge without a
degree, was working like a horse at Clifford's-inn. Stony-hearted and
stony-minded, he loved neither poetry nor pleasure. From the moment he
began the appointed task of his life, he dreamed of nothing but fame,
and of that only for the sake of the sterling recompense it brings.
Friendships not convertible to cash, Coke resolutely foreswore at the
commencement of