He began life with great gifts and noble ends; he was a serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books and things, and he turned his studies to full account.

He had imagination and love of enterprise, which gave him an insight into Bacon's ideas such as none of Bacon's contemporaries had.

He was a man of simple and earnest religion; he sympathized most with the Puritans, because they were serious and because they were hardly used.

Those who most condemn him acknowledge his nobleness and generosity of nature.

Bacon in after days, when all was over between them, spoke of him as a man always _patientissimus veri_; "the more plainly and frankly you shall deal with my lord," he writes elsewhere, "not only in disclosing particulars, but in giving him _caveats_ and admonishing him of any error which in this action he may commit (such is his lordship's nature), the better he will take it." "He must have seemed," says Mr.Spedding, a little too grandly, "in the eyes of Bacon like the hope of the world." The two men, certainly, became warmly attached.