Bacon, whose eye was everywhere, was not sparing of his counsels.

On all the great questions of the time he has left behind abundant evidence, not only of what he thought, but of what he advised.

And in every case these memorials are marked with the insight, the independence, the breadth of view, and the moderation of a mind which is bent on truth.

He started, of course, from a basis which we are now hardly able to understand or allow for, the idea of absolute royal power and prerogative which James had enlarged and hardened out of the Kingship of the Tudors, itself imperious and arbitrary enough, but always seeking, with a tact of which James was incapable, to be in touch and sympathy with popular feeling.

But it was a basis which in principle every one of any account as yet held or professed to hold, and which Bacon himself held on grounds of philosophy and reason.