He throws himself with such zest into the language of the moralist, the theologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the author of a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler of tables of natural history.

When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer.
If he had not been the author of the _Instauratio_, his life would not have looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd and supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and who unscrupulously pushed their way to preferment.

He claimed to be, in spite of the misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as devoted to public work and as capable of it as any of them.

He was ready for anything, for any amount of business, ready, as in everything, to take infinite trouble about it.

The law, if he did not like it, was yet no by-work with him; he was as truly ambitious as the men with whom he maintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a rivalry.