This was a project which would find little favour with Coke, and the crowd of lawyers who venerated him--men whom Bacon viewed with mingled contempt and apprehension both in the courts and in Parliament where they were numerous, and whom he more than once advised the King to bridle and keep "in awe." Bacon presented his scheme to the King in a Proposition, or, as we should call it, a Report.

It is very able and interesting; marked with his characteristic comprehensiveness and sense of practical needs, and with a confidence in his own knowledge of law which contrasts curiously with the current opinion about it.

He speaks with the utmost honour of Coke's work, but he is not afraid of a comparison with him.

"I do assure your Majesty," he says, "I am in good hope that when Sir Edward Coke's Reports and my Rules and Decisions shall come to posterity, there will be (whatever is now thought) question who was the greater lawyer." But the project, though it was entertained and discussed in Parliament, came to nothing.

No one really cared about it except Bacon.
But in these years (1615 and 1616) two things happened of the utmost consequence to him.