might never have puzzled historians by his remarkable last word on the scaffold to the priest — " Remember." The Petition of Right bears date with the eighth year of the Plymouth Colony; and it gave the coup de grace to Coke's career, for he never resumed his seat in Parliament and died in 1634 aged four-score years and three. While Coke was fighting Charles, Bacon was composing apothegms and died without knowledge of the Petition of Right. Possibly Coke's well-known contempt for science and literature of every kind was heightened by Bacon's eminence therein. The Lord Chancellor had magnanimously — perhaps ostentatiously — presented Coke with a copy of the " Novum Organum," and beneath the autographic presentation Coke had written : — "It deserves not to be read in schooles. But to be freighted in the Ship of Fooles."
To Coke Ben Jonson was a vagrant, poetry and the drama foolishness; while
money making, law and politics constituted the snmma bona of life. As judge he was beyond all suspicion of chicanery and cor ruption and at least held that advantage over Bacon. In comparing the two, readers of their careers will undoubtedly agree to Lord Campbell's verdict, " most men would rather have been a Bacon than a Coke." In the firmament of intellect Bacon was a sun, and Coke an inferior planet, the most conspicuous in shining after shadows fell upon the earth. Among British lawyers the name of Coke is pronounced as idem sonans Cooke; and accent on the name of Bacon falls on the last dissyllable to differentiate it from the national breakfast dish. Oddly, too, no Eng lish lawyer even refers to " Lord " Coke, but always to " Sir Edward"; yet names Lord Bacon although there never was, tech nically, such a Peer. Must not the moral of their lives be esti mated by the character of the times in which they together lived?
