and adds:
"It is not his greatness that I admire, but his virtue."
Thomas Bushel, his servant, in a letter to Mr. John Eliot, printed in 1628, in a volume called "The First Part of Youth's Errors," says:
"Yet lest the calumnious tongues of men might extenuate the good opinion you had of his worth and merit, I must ingenuously confess that my selfe and others of his servants were the occasion of exhaling his vertues into a darke exlipse; which God knowes would have long endured both for the honour of his King and the good of the Commonaltie; had not we whom his bountie nursed, laid on his guiltlesse shoulders our base and execrable deeds to be scand and censured by the whole senate of a state, where no sooner sentence was given, but most of us forsoke him, which makes us bear the badge of Jewes to this day. Yet I am confident there were some Godly Daniels amongst us.... As for myselfe, with shame I must acquit the title, and pleade guilty; which grieves my very soule, that so matchlesse a Peer should be lost by such insinuating caterpillars, who in his owne nature scorn'd the least thought of any base, unworthy, or ignoble act, though subject to infirmites as ordained to the wisest."
In Fuller's "Worthies" it is written:
"He was a rich Cabinet filled with Judgment, Wit, Fancy and Memory, and had the golden Key, Elocution, to open it. He was singular in singulis, in every Science and Art, and being In-at-all came off with Credit. He was too Bountifull to his Servants, and either too confident of their Honesty, or too conniving at their Falsehood. 'Tis said he had 2 Servants, one in all Causes Patron to the Plaintiff, the other to the Defendant, but taking bribes of both, with this Condition, to restore the Mony received, if the Cause went against them. Such practices, tho' unknown to their Master, cost him the loss of his Office."
In "The Lives of Statesmen and Favourites of Elizabeth's Reign" it is said:—
"His religion was rational and sober, his spirit publick, his love to relations tender, to Friends faithful, to the hopeful liberal, to men universal, to his very Enemies civil. He left the best pattern of Government in his actions under one king and the best principles of it in the Life of the other."
The following is a translation from the discourse on the life of Mr. Francis Bacon which is prefixed to the "Histoire Naturelle," by Piere Amboise, published in Paris in 1631: