The first is that hereafter the greatness of a
judge or magistrate shall be no sanctuary or protection of guiltiness,
which is the beginning of a golden world. The next, that after this
example it is like that judges will fly from anything that is in the
likeness of corruption as from a serpent." Bacon's own judgment on
himself, deliberately repeated, is characteristic, and probably comes
near the truth. "Howsoever, I acknowledge the sentence just and for
reformation's sake fit," he writes to Buckingham from the Tower, where,
for form's sake, he was imprisoned for a few miserable days, he yet had
been "the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes that
have been since Sir Nicolas Bacon's time." He repeated the same thing
yet more deliberately in later times. "_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._"
He might have gone on to add, "the Wisest Counsellor; and yet none on
whom rested heavier blame; none of whom England might more justly
complain.
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