ancellor's intervention. He refused to answer any
communications from suitors in his court,[12] and it was doubtless to
Ellesmere (as weeding out the "enormous sin" of judicial corruption)[13]
that John Donne, who was his secretary, addressed his fifth satire. He
gained Camden's admiration, who records an anagram on his name, "Gestat
Honorem." Bacon, whose merit he had early recognized, and whose claims
to the office of solicitor-general he had unavailingly supported both in
1594 and 1606, calls him "a true sage, a salvia in the garden of the
state," and speaks with gratitude of his "fatherly kindness." Ben
Jonson, among the poets, extolled in an epigram his "wing'd judgements,"
"purest hands," and constancy. Though endowed with considerable
oratorical gifts he followed the true judicial tradition and affected to
despise eloquence as "not decorum for judges, that ought to respect the
Matter and not the Humours of the Hearers."[14] Like others of his day
he hoped to see a codification of the laws,[15] and appears to have had
greater faith in judge-made law than in statutes of the realm, advising
the parliament (October 27, 1601) "that laws in force might be revised
and explained and no new laws made," and describing the Statute of Wills
passed in Henry VIII.'s reign as the "ruin of ancient families" and "the
nurse of forgeries." In the thirty-eighth year of Elizabeth he drew up
rules for procedure in the Star Chamber,[16] restricting the fees, and
in the eighth of James I. ordinances for remedying abuses in the court
of chancery. In 1609 he published his judgment in the case of the Post
Nati, which appears to be the only certain work of his authorship. The
following have been ascribed to him:--_The Privileges and Prerogatives
of the High Court of Chancery_ (1641); _Certain Observations concerning
the Office of the Lord Chancellor_ (1651)--denied by Lord Chancellor
Hardwicke in _A Discourse of the Judicial Authority of the Master of the
Rolls_ (1728) to be Lord Ellesmere's work; _Observations on Lord Coke's
Reports_, ed. by G. Paul (about 1710), the only evidence of his
authorship being apparently that the MS. was in his handwriting; four
MSS., bequeathed to his chaplain, Bishop Williams, viz. _The Prerogative
Royal, Privileges of Parliament, Proceedings in Chancery_ and _The Power
of the Star Chamber; Notes and Observations on Magna Charta, &c._, Sept.
1615 (Harl. 4265, f. 35), and _An Abridgment of Lord Coke's Reports_
(s