the cause should go in favor of the giver, it is indeed impossible to say. But until it is produced, I do not see why we should believe it.

But I am myself prepared to go a little further. I think I see reasons why we should not believe it. The absence of all evidence that Bacon's decrees were unjust, coupled with the consideration that evidence could hardly have been wanting if they were, makes it in my opinion extremely improbable that they were bought. It would be absurd to suppose that the only suitors who attempted to gain their causes by bribery were those whose causes were good. If many decrees were bought, some must have been unjust. Now by every unjust decree, if one man "got what he had paid for," another lost what he was entitled to. Every man so aggrieved had some means of redress, and after Bacon's conviction he must have had every encouragement and advantage in pursuing it; for the practice of corruption being admitted, the presumption would be against the judgment. How many, then, of Bacon's decrees were appealed against? and of these how many were reversed? If none or few, how can we believe that he had sold them by hundreds? If many, where are they? Reversals of decrees in chancery must be recorded somewhere; and yet (except a somewhat loose assertion in a manuscript of Lord Chief Justice Hale's published by Hargrave) I find no mention of any such reversals anywhere. Lord Hale, it is true, in tracing the origin of the jurisdiction of the Lords in reversing equity decrees, mentions the censure of Bacon "for many decrees made upon most gross bribery and corruption," words sufficiently justified by the terms of the sentence and submission, and grounded probably upon nothing more,-"and this," he adds, "gave such a discredit and brand to the decrees thus obtained, that they were easily set aside, and made way in the Parliament of 3 Car. for the like attempts against decrees made by other Chancellors." Now that the decrees made by Bacon upon the cases in which presents were admitted to have been received, were thereby discredited, we may safely conclude: the presumption, as I said, would of course be against them; and if by "easily set aside" be meant only that, their authority being lost, the right of appeal against them was easily admitted (and such may very well be the meaning, for this was the point Hale was considering), - I can easily believe that also. But if he means they were easily reversed on appeal,- that is, that

many of them were reversed-I still ask where the evidence is. Hale is so great an authority that though manuscripts not published or left for publication by the writer are to be received with caution, as probably containing some loose suggestions which he intended to verify at more leisure-any assertion of his is well worth inquiry. But he was a boy when these things happened. He was writing, it would seem, after the Restoration. His information, so far as it rests upon his personal knowledge and judgment, must have been derived from documents which were then, and should be still, accessible. Where are we to look for these documents? From the passage I have quoted, I should have been led to look in the records of the proceedings of the House of Lords; for he is obviously speaking of reversals of decrees of chancery "by an inherent original jurisdiction" in that house; which jurisdiction, he tells us, had its rise upon three occasions: the first being this case of Bacon; whose decrees being made upon bribery and corruption were "easily set aside," and made way for the "like attempts" seven or eight years after; and this would certainly lead one to suppose that Bacon's decrees were set aside by the House of Lords in virtue of this supposed original jurisdiction, and to look in the Lords' Journal for traces of them.

But the next page seems to make this inquiry superfluous; for there he tells us that he "could never yet see any precedent"- he does not say any other, but any precedent" of such proceeding in the Lords' house of greater antiquity than 3 Car. I." And how could that be if it was by them that many of Bacon's decrees had been easily set aside?"

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Moreover, that Hale had no records of such proceedings upon Bacon's decrees is made still clearer by the passage which immediately follows.

"I shall now," he proceeds, "show what was the first attempt of setting up this jurisdiction in the Lords' house, and what success it had.

"Before the parliament of 18 Jac., when the Lord Chancellor Bacon was censured for corruption, the course for reversal of decrees was, either by petition to the King, and thereupon a commission issued to examine the decree and proceedings, whereof there are some precedents; or else to set it aside by act of parliament; and such was the proceeding of 26 Maii 21 Jac. for reversing a decree for the felt makers and some others about that time."

This proceeding (I should observe) appears in the Commons' Journal; but I cannot gather from the notes by whom the decree in question was made. However, it was not one of those upon which Bacon was charged with corruption.

"But even in these later Parliaments in King James' time, the reversal of decrees by the inherent power of the House of Lords was either not known, or so new that it was scarce adventured upon by the Lords."

And he then goes on to relate the proceedings upon an appeal against a decree made not by Bacon, but by Bishop Williams, who succeeded him.

If, therefore, any of Bacon's decrees were reversed, it was not (so far as Hale could discover) by the House of Lords; but must have been either by act of parliament, or by the King's commission. Yet in the table of contents to the Statutes at Large a list is given of the titles of private acts; and I have searched in vain there for traces of any such reversals. From the Commons' Journal I find indeed that about the time of his fall several bills for the reversals of decrees of Chancery were brought in; but I cannot find that any of them reached a third reading. I find also that about three years later another bill of the same kind—and one which very nearly touches the point in question -was brought in; namely, "an act to avoid a decree procured indirectly and by corruption between the Lord and Lady Wharton, etc., and Edward Willoughby, Esquire." It was read a first time on the thirteenth of March, 1623-4; and this was one of the cases in which a present had been received by Bacon pendente lite. If this bill had passed, therefore, it would have been one case in point. But I cannot trace it beyond the second reading, and no such title is to be found among the private acts. I conclude, therefore, that it did not pass; and if so, the fact tells the other way.

Another fact which I cannot well reconcile with the supposition that many of Bacon's decrees were reversed in this way is supplied by a note of his own, set down about the end of the year 1622. It occurs in that sheet of memoranda for a conversation with Buckingham's mother, which will be found elsewhere in this volume, and runs thus: "You may observe that last Parliament," meaning the session which commenced on the fourteenth of November and ended on the eighteenth of December, 1621" though an high-coming Parliament, yet not a petition, not a clamor, not a motion, not a mention of me."

Upon this point, therefore, the records of Parliament tell distinctly and almost decisively in Bacon's favor. They show that the circumstances of his conviction did encourage suitors to attempt to get his decrees set aside; that several such attempts were made, but that they all failed; thereby strongly confirming the popular tradition reported by Aubrey," His favorites took bribes; but his Lordship always gave judgment secundum æquum et bonum. His decrees in Chancery stand firm. There are fewer of his decrees reversed than any other chancellor."

If on the other hand they were reversed by a commission appointed for the purpose, we must surely have had some news of it. Yet I cannot suppose that either Hale himself or his editor, who prefaces the tract with an elaborate investigation of the whole subject, had heard of any such proceeding. They could not but have mentioned it if they had.

Upon the whole, therefore, I think I may conclude either that the decrees mentioned by Lord Hale were considered as ipso facto set aside by the admission of corruption (which could hardly be, and even if it were, could not be taken to prove more than is admitted in the confession), or that he used the words loosely, meaning only that they were easily allowed to be called in question (which might be true, and yet upon question they might all be found just), or, lastly, that he was speaking without book. And either way I may still ask, where is the evidence of justice perverted? Till some evidence is produced to that effect, I may still believe Bacon's own judgment upon his own case to be true. He expressed it on two occasions; privately indeed, but clearly and unequivocally. The first was in his letter to Buckingham, written from the Tower on the thirty-first of May, 1621; in which, after entreating him to procure his discharge and not let him die in that disgraceful place, he proceeds:

"And when I am dead, he is gone that was always in one tenor, a true and perfect servant to his master, and one that was never author of any immoderate, no, nor unsafe, no (I will say it), nor unfortunate counsel; and one that no temptation could ever make other than a trust and honest and thrice-loving friend to your Lordship; and howsoever I acknowledge the sentence just, and for reformation's sake fit, the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes since Sir Nicholas Bacon's time."

This was written in the season of his deepest distress. The other occasion I cannot date. But I take the words to express his deliberate judgment imparted to the confidential friend of his latter days; - imparted privately, and (it would almost seem) under some injunction to keep it private; for Dr. Rawley, whose affectionate reverence preserved the record, took the precaution to write it in a cipher, and never published or alluded to it in print. It is found in a commonplace book, begun apparently soon after Bacon's death, and containing memoranda of various kinds, most of them, especially in the earlier part, relating to him and his works. The first few pages are filled almost entirely with apothegms; two or three of which were written in a simple cipher, the Greek character being used for the consonants, and the first five numerals for the vowels; the rest in Rawley's usual hand. Opposite to many of them is written "stet,' ," with a number affixed; which means no doubt that they were to be included in the collection of Bacon's apothegms which were afterwards printed in the second edition of the "Resuscitatio." At the top of the first page stands this sentence, written in the cipher and not marked or numbered, a sentence which I suppose Rawley had been forbidden to publish, but could not allow to perish:

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"I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred years."

Now if instead of Lord Macaulay's view of the case the later ages should accept Bacon's own (and although he was a party so deeply interested, I really believe it to be much the more impartial of the two, - self-love in a mind which finds its highest pleasure in knowing and believing the truth being far less fatal to fairness of judgment than the love of rhetorical effect in a mind rhetorically disposed) - they will escape the other difficulties, and without refusing to believe anything to his disadvantage of which there is any pretense of proof, they may nevertheless "name his name with reverence," as that of a man to be respected for his moral, as well as respected for his intellectual qualities. For if his acts of corruption did not involve injustice or oppression to either party, whether in the form of extortion or deception or false judgment, they were acts compatible-not indeed with the highest moral condition, for a more sensitive morality joined with so clear a judgment would have started at and shrunk from them, but certainly