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the same year made a start for the highest prize in the profession by being appointed to conduct the defence of Warren Hastings. In Macaulay's famous description of the famous trial, he alludes to "the bold and strongminded Law," who, with unfailing energy and audacious skill, confronted the eloquence of the managers of the impeachment, Fox and Sheridan, Burke and Windham, and proved himself not unworthy of crossing swords with those notable adversaries.

The following sketches of the lives of great lawyers all point the same old moral-that moral which, in the ears of the young, the elders of each generation are always so assiduously repeating—that everything in this world falls to the patient. To labour and to wait, that is the true secret of success. The biography of every man who has risen to eminence is nothing more than a commentary on the commonplace truth which has been expressed by poets and teachers in so many different ways, but always with the same application; as, for instance, "In life, nothing bears fruit except by toil of mind and body;" or, as the poet puts it

"Rich are the diligent, who can command

Time, nature's stock! and could his hour-glass fall,
Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,
And by incessant labour gather all."

Labour that is the keynote not only of a successful but of an honourable life. A shrewd observer, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, writes:-"The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy, invincible determination, a pur

pose well fixed, and then death or victory. That quality will do anything that can be done in this world, and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged creature a man without it."

And yet another lesson do they teach-the importance of keeping open the mind for the reception of all kinds of knowledge. A man of no pursuit is necessarily a narrow-minded man. The great lawyers portrayed in the following pages were great lawyers because they were something more than lawyers-were scholars, philanthropists, reformers, or statesmen.

Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam).

1561-1626.

"For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next age."—From Lord Bacon's Will.

Afar, upon a sea all unexplored,

A gallant vessel rides with venturous prow;
And soon, with precious spoils of Ophir stored,
Returns to port exultant. Vainly now
Each envious eye has marked its ragged poles,

Its torn and shattered sides has rudely scanned!
Alas, the jealousy of little souls

When dwarfed before the great they shivering stand !

Such was thy fortune, Verulam, whose mind,
Informed with living wisdom, roamed the vast
And glorious realms of Science, and the Past
Despoiled of all the treasures it enshrined !

But these our times have done thee justice; late
Thy laurels have been wrung from partial Fate.

I.

RANCIS BACON, Lord Verulam, the father of Inductive Philosophy, best known in English history and English literature as Lord Bacon, was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Queen Elizabeth's Lord-Keeper, by his wife, Anne Cooke, one of the

accomplished daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to Edward VI.

He was born on the 22nd of January, 1561, at York House, in the Strand,-not then, as now, a busy highway of trade and commerce, shut out from the river by lines of stuccoed houses and shops, but a broad tract of green fields and blooming hedgerows, besprinkled with noble mansions, the gardens of which descended to the very margin of the "royal towered Thames." York House, held as a fief from the Crown, was situated not far from the queen's palace. It had at one time been occupied by the Bishops of Norwich as their "inn" or townresidence; but, reverting to the Crown in the reign of Henry VIII., was bestowed upon Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the husband of Mary Tudor, the widowed Queen of France. Queen Mary gave it to Lord Chancellor Heath, the Catholic Archbishop of York, upon whose downfall it passed, by lease, to his successor in office, Sir Nicholas Bacon. It was a spacious and pleasant mansion, commanding a fine view of the river, then gay with waterpageants and processions, from the gray towers of Lambeth to the picturesque span of London Bridge.

Like most great men, Bacon was much indebted to the admirable parts and acquirements of his mother, who was a firm adherent of the Reformed faith, and a versatile scholar. She and her sister had been carefully imbued with the spirit of the ancient learning. She conducted a controversial correspondence in Greek with Bishop Jewel, whose "Apologia " she translated into English with rare fidelity. She also rendered from the Italian some abstruse sermons on "Fate and Free Will," by Bernardo Ochino. At the same time, she bore a high repute as a notable housewife, who was versed in all the mysteries of

domestic economy. Her husband, Sir Nicholas,-fiftyone years old, when Francis, his youngest son, was born, -if not endowed with genius, was a man of sound clear judgment, excellent discretion, and lively humour. It was said of this urbane and portly "courtier of the queen's," that "some men look wiser than they are; the lord-keeper is wiser than he looks." Some happy sayings of his have been preserved. "Let us take time," he would exclaim, "that we may be sooner done." When a thief, named Hogg, put in a plea for a mild sentence on the ground that a kinship existed between Hogg and Bacon, he drily remarked: "Nay, nay, you and I cannot be of kin until you have been hanged." Queen Elizabeth, visiting him at his country seat of Redgrave, observed: "My lord, what a little house you have gotten! ""Madame," replied the lord-keeper, "my house is well, but you have made me too great for my house."

While he derived his sense of humour, his shrewdness, and what I would call his "practical turn of mind" from his father, it was to his mother that Bacon owed his finer qualities, his rare intellectual powers, and his thirst after knowledge. She superintended his education until he was thirteen, and grounded him thoroughly in the classics. A picturesque sketch of this remarkable woman has been drawn by Mr. Hepworth Dixon, and as it is free from exaggeration I shall transfer it to these pages:

"More loving and more taking," he describes her, "slower in her opinions, gentler in her deeds, than the majority of her sex; a little high and masterful; apt, as many good women are, to give strong advice. In her motherly eyes, her two sons remained always the same little fellows who had played in the galleries of York House, or rolled on the sward at Gorhambury; boys needing a mother's eye and a mother's voice; and, in

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