Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.

THE PLANET-WATCHERS OF GREENWICH

There is a morsel of Greenwich Park, which has, for now nearly two centuries, been held sacred from intrusion. It is the portion inclosed by the walls of the Observatory. Certainly a hundred thousand visitors must ramble over the surrounding lawns, and look with curious eye upon the towers and outer boundaries of that little citadel of science, for one who finds admission to the interior of the building. Its brick towers, with flanking turrets and picturesque roofs, perched on the side of the gravelly hill, and sheltered round about by groups of fine old trees, are as well known as Greenwich Hospital itself. But what work goes on inside its carefully preserved boundary, and under those movable, black-domed roofs, is a popular mystery. Many a holiday-maker's wonder has been excited by the fall, at one o'clock, of the huge, black ball, high up there, by the weather vane on the topmost point of the eastern turret. He knows, or is told if he asks a loitering pensioner, that the descent of the ball tells the time as truly as the sun; and that all the ships in the river watch it to set their chronometers by, before they sail; and, that, all the railway clocks, and all the railway trains over the kingdom are arranged punctually by its indications. But how the heavens are watched to secure this punctual definition of the flight of time, and what other curious labors are going on inside the Observatory, is a sealed book. The public have always been, of necessity, excluded from the Observatory walls, for the place is devoted to the prosecution of a science whose operations are inconsistent with the bustle, the interruptions, the talk, and the anxieties of popular curiosity and examination.

But when public information and instruction are the objects, the doors are widely opened, and the press and its attachés find a way into this, as into many other sacred and forbidden spots. Only last week one of "our own contributors" was seen in a carriage on the Greenwich railway, poring over the paper in the last Edinburgh Review that describes our national astronomical establishment, and was known afterward to have climbed the Observatory hill, and to have rung and gained admission at the little, black, mysterious gate in the Observatory wall. Let us see what is told in his report of what he saw within that sacred portal.

In the park on a fine day all seems life and gayety – once within the Observatory boundary, the first feeling is that of isolation. There is a curious stillness about the place, and the foot-step of the old pensioner, who closes the gate upon a visitor, echoes again on the pavement as he goes away to wake up from his astronomical or meteorological trance one of the officers of this sanctum. Soon, under the guidance of the good genius so invoked, the secrets of the place begin to reveal themselves.

The part of the Observatory so conspicuous from without is the portion least used within. When it was designed by Christopher Wren, the general belief was that such buildings should be lofty, that the observer might be raised toward the heavenly bodies whose motions he was to watch. More modern science has taught its disciples better; and in Greenwich – which is an eminently practical Observatory – the working part of the building is found crouching behind the loftier towers. These are now occupied as subsidiary to the modern practical building. The ground floor is used as a residence by the chief astronomer; above is the large hall originally built to contain huge moveable telescopes and quadrants – such as are not now employed. Nowadays, this hall occasionally becomes a sort of scientific counting-house – irreverent but descriptive term – in which, from time to time, a band of scientific clerks are congregated to post up the books, in which the daily business of the planets has been jotted down by the astronomers who watch those marvelous bodies. Another portion is a kind of museum of astronomical curiosities. Flamstead and Halley, and their immediate successors, worked in these towers, and here still rest some of the old, rude tools with which their discoveries were completed, and their reputation, and the reputation of Greenwich, were established. As time has gone on, astronomers and opticians have invented new, and more perfect, and more luxurious instruments. Greater accuracy is thus obtainable, at a less expenditure of human patience and labor; and so the old tools are cast aside. One of them belonged to Halley, and was put up by him a hundred and thirty years ago; another is an old brazen quadrant, with which many valuable observations were made in by-gone times; and another, an old iron quadrant, still fixed in the stone pier to which it was first attached. Some of the huge telescopes that once found place in this old Observatory, have been sent away. One went to the Cape of Good Hope, and has been useful there. Another of the unsatisfactory, and now unused instruments, had a tube twenty-five feet long, whose cool and dark interior was so pleasant to the spiders that, do what they would, the astronomers could not altogether banish the persevering insects from it. Spin they would; and, spite of dusting and cleaning, and spider-killing, spin they did; and, at length, the savans got more instruments and less patience, and the spiders were left in quiet possession. This has been pleasantly spoken of as an instance of poetical justice. It is but fair that spiders should, at times, have the best of astronomers, for astronomers rob spiders for the completion of their choicest instruments. No fabric of human construction is fine enough to strain across the eyepiece of an important telescope, and opticians preserve a particular race of spiders, that their webs may be taken for that purpose. The spider lines are strained across the best instruments at Greenwich and elsewhere; and when the spinners of these beautifully fine threads disturbed the accuracy of the tube in the western wing of the old Observatory, it was said to be but fair retaliation for the robberies the industrious insects had endured.

A narrow stair leads from the unused rooms of the old Observatory to its leaded roof, whence a magnificent view is obtained; the park, the hospital, the town of Greenwich, and the windings of the Thames, and, gazing further, London itself comes grandly into the prospect. The most inveterate astronomer could scarcely fail to turn for a moment from the wonders of the heavens to admire these glories of the earth. From the leads, two turrets are reached, where the first constantly active operations in this portion of the building, are in progress.

At the present time, indeed, these turrets are the most useful portions of the old building. In one is placed the well-known contrivance for registering, hour after hour, and day after day, the force and direction of the wind. To keep such a watch by human vigilance, and to make such a register by human labor, would be a tedious, expensive, and irksome task; and human ingenuity taxed itself to make a machine for perfecting such work. The wind turns a weather-cock, and, by aid of cog-wheels the motion is transferred to a lead pencil fixed over a sheet of paper, and thus the wind is made to write down the direction which itself is blowing. Not far distant is a piece of metal, the flat side of which is ever turned by the weather-cock to meet the full force of the wind, which, blowing upon it, drives it back against a spring. To this spring is affixed a chain passing over, pullies toward another pencil, fixed above a sheet of paper, and moving faithfully, more or less, as the wind blows harder or softer. And thus the "gentle zephyr" and the fresh breeze, and the heavy gale, and, when it comes, the furious hurricane, are made to note down their character and force. The sheet of paper on which the uncertain element, the wind, is bearing witness against itself, is fixed upon a frame moved by clock-work. Steady as the progress of time, this ingenious mechanism draws the paper under the suspended pencils. Thus each minute and each hour has its written record, without human help or inspection. Once a day only, an assistant comes to put a new blank sheet in the place of that which has been covered by the moving pencils, and the latter is taken away to be bound up in a volume. The book might with truth be lettered, "The History of the Wind; written by Itself" – an Æolian autobiography.

Close by is another contrivance for registering in decimals of an inch the quantity of rain that falls. The drops are caught, and passing down a tube, a permanent mark is made by which the quantity is determined.

The eastern turret is devoted to the Time Ball and its mechanism. Far out at sea – away from all sources of information but those to be asked of the planets, his compass, his quadrant, his chronometer, and his almanack, the mariner feels the value of time in a way which the landsman can scarcely conceive. If his chronometer is right, he may feel safe; let him have reason to doubt its accuracy, and he knows how the perils surrounding him are increased. An error of a few seconds in his time may place him in danger – an error of a few minutes may lead him to steer blindly to his certain wreck. Hence his desire when he is leaving port to have his time-pieces right to a second; and hence the expenditure of thought, and labor, and money, at the Greenwich Observatory, to afford the shipping of the great port of London, and the English navy, the exact time – true to the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute – and to afford them also a book, the Nautical Almanack, containing a mass of astronomical facts, on which they may base their calculations, with full reliance as to their accuracy. Every day for the last seventeen years, at five minutes before one o'clock, the black ball five feet across and stuffed with cork, is raised halfway up its shaft above the eastern turret of the observatory – at two-and-a-half minutes before that hour, it rises to the top. Telescopes from many a point, both up and down the river, are now pointed to this dark spot above the Greenwich trees, and many an anxious mariner has his time-pieces beside him, that their indications may be made true. Watch the ball as you stand in the Park. It is now just raised. You must wait two minutes and a half, and as you do so, you feel what a minute may be. It seems a long, palpable, appreciable time, indeed. In the turret below, stands a clock telling the true time, gained by a laborious watching of the clock-stars; and beside the clock, is a man with a practiced hand upon a trigger, and a practiced eye upon the face of the dial. One minute – two minutes pass. Thirty seconds more, and the trigger has released the Ball. As it leaves the top of the shaft, it is one o'clock to the tenth of a second By the time it has reached the bottom it is some five seconds later.

Leaving the Ball Turret, and the old building which it surmounts, the new Observatory, where the chief work of the establishment is done, claims our notice. This attention would scarcely be given to its outward appearance for it is a long, low building, scarcely seen beyond its own boundaries. The Greenwich Observatory is not a show place, but an eminently practical establishment. St. Petersburg and other cities have much more gorgeous buildings devoted to astronomical purposes, and Russia and other countries spend much more money on astronomy than England does, yet the Greenwich Tables have a world-wide reputation, and some of them are used as the groundwork for calculations in all Observatories at home and abroad. The astronomer does not want marble halls or grand saloons for his work. Galileo used a bell-tower at Venice, and Kepler stood on the bridge at Prague to watch the stars. The men, not the buildings, do the work. No disappointment, need be felt, then, to find the modern Observatory a range of unadorned buildings running east and west, with slits in the roof and in some of the walls. Within these simple buildings are the instruments now used, displaying almost the perfection of mechanical skill in their construction and finish – beautifully adapted to the object they have to fulfill, and in perfect order. They are fixed on solid piers of masonry, deeply imbedded in the earth, to secure freedom from vibration – a quality better obtained when the foundations are on sand or gravel than when on rock.

To describe the instruments by their technical names, and to go into any particulars of the instruments they have superseded, would take space, only to do the work of a scientific treatise. Enough, therefore, to say, that there are the telescopes best adapted to the chief duty of the place, which is, watching the moon whenever she is visible; watching the clock-stars, by which the true time is calculated more exactly than it could be from observations of the sun alone; and watching other planetary bodies as they pass the meridian. Eclipses, occultations, and other phenomena, of course, have their share of attention, and add to the burden of the observer's duties.

The staff of the Observatory includes a chief astronomer, Mr. Airy, with a salary of £800 a year; and six assistants who are paid, £470, £290, £240, £150, £130, and £130, respectively. This does not include the officers of the Meteorological branch of the establishment, to be spoken of hereafter; and which consists of Mr. Glaisher, with £240 a year, one assistant at £120, and two additional computers. At times, when these scientific laborers have collected more observations than they are able to work out; additional help is summoned, in shape of the body of scientific clerks before spoken of; who, seated at desks, cast up the accounts the planetary bodies, including such regular old friends as the moon and fixed stars, but not forgetting those wandering celestial existences that rush, from time to time, over the meridian, and may be fairly called the chance customers of the astronomer.

Though the interior of the Observatory seems so still, the life of those employed there has its excitements. Looking through telescopes forms a small part only of their duty – and that duty can not be done when the weather is unfavorable. On cloudy days the observer is idle; in bright weather he is busy; and a long continuance of clear days and nights gives him more employment than he can well complete. Summer, therefore, is his time of labor; winter his time of rest. It appears that in our climate the nights, on the whole, are clearer than the days, and evenings less cloudy than mornings. Every assistant takes his turn as an observer, and a chain of duty is kept up night and day; at other periods, the busiest portion of the twenty-four hours at the Observatory, is between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon. During this time they work in silence, the task being to complete the records of the observations made, by filling in the requisite columns of figures upon printed forms, and then adding and subtracting them as the case requires. While thus engaged, the assistant who has charge of an instrument looks, from time to time, at his star regulated clock, and when it warns him that his expected planet is nearly due, he leaves his companions, and quietly repairs to the room where the telescope is ready. The adjustment of this has previously been arranged with the greatest nicety. The shutter is moved from the slit in the roof, the astronomer sits upon an easy chair with a movable back. If the object he seeks is high in the heavens, this chair-back is lowered till its occupant almost lies down; if the star is lower, the chair-back is raised in proportion. He has his note-book and metallic pencil in hand. Across the eye-piece of the telescope are stretched seven lines of spider-web, dividing the field of view. If his seat requires change, the least motion arranges it to his satisfaction, for it rests upon a railway of its own. Beside him is one of the star-clocks, and as the moment approaches for the appearance of the planet, the excitement of the moment increases. "The tremble of impatience for the entrance of the star on the field of view," says an Edinburgh Reviewer, "is like that of a sportsman whose dog has just made a full point, and who awaits the rising of the game. When a star appears, the observer, in technical language, takes a second from the clock face; that is, he reads the second with his eye, and counts on by the ear the succeeding beats of the clock, naming the seconds mentally. As the star passes each wire of the transit, he marks down in his jotting-book with a metallic pencil the second, and the second only, of his observation, with such a fraction of a second as corresponds, in his judgment, to the interval of time between the passage of the star, and the beat of the clock which preceded such passage."

An experienced observer will never commit an error in this mental calculation, exceeding the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute. When the star has been thus watched over the seven cobweb lines (or wires), the observer jots down the hour and minute, in addition to the second, and the task is done. Stars, not very near the sun, may be seen in broad daylight, but, at night, it is requisite to direct a ray of light from a lamp, so far to enlighten the field of the telescope, as to permit the spider lines to be seen running across the brighter ground on which the expected star is to be visible.

The adjustment of the instruments is a task of great nicety. If they are out of trim only a shadow of a shade of a hair's-breadth, the desired accuracy is interfered with, and they have to be re-adjusted. Temperature is of course an important element in their condition, and a slight sensibility may do mischief. The warmth of the observer's body, when approaching the instruments, has been known to affect their accuracy; and to avoid such sources of error, instruments have at times been cased in flannel, that the non-conducting powers of that homely fabric might screen the too-sensitive metal.

Sunday is a comparative holiday at the Observatory, for then, except when any extraordinary phenomena are expected, the only duty done is to drop the Time Ball, and observe the moon's place. The moon is never neglected, and her motions have been here watched, during the last hundred and seventy years, with the most pertinacious care – to the great service of astronomy, and the great benefit of navigation.

The library should not pass unnoticed. It is small; but being devoted to works upon astronomy, and the kindred sciences, there is ample room for all that has hitherto been written on the subject, or that can, for many generations, be produced. The observations of a lifetime spent in watching the stars may be printed in marvelously few pages. A glance through the Greenwich Astronomical Library gives a rough general idea of what the world has done and is doing for the promotion of this science. Russia contributes large, imperial-looking tomes, that tell of extended observations made under the munificent patronage of a despot; Germany sends from different points a variety of smaller, cheaper-looking, yet valuable contributions; France gives proofs of her genius and her discoveries; but her forte is not in observation. The French are bad observers. They have no such proofs of unremitting, patient toil in search of facts, as those afforded in the records of the Greenwich Tables of the Moon. Indeed, Greenwich, as we have already said, is a working Observatory; and those who go into its library, and its fire-proof manuscript-room, and see how its volumes of observations have been growing from the small beginnings of the days of Flamstead and Halley, to those of our later and more, liberal times, will have good reason to acknowledge that the money devoted to this establishment has been well employed.

One other spot must be noticed as among the notable things in this astronomical sanctum. It is the Chronometer-room, to which, during the first three Mondays in the year, the chief watch-makers of London send in their choicest instruments for examination and trial. The watches remain for a good portion of a year; their rates being noted, day by day, by two persons; and then the makers of the best receive prizes, and their instruments are purchased for the navy. Other competitors obtain certificates of excellence, which bring customers from the merchant service; while others pass unrewarded. To enter the room where these admirable instruments are kept, suggests the idea of going into a Brobdingnag watch-factory. Round the place are ranged shelves, on which the large watches are placed, all ticking in the most distinct and formidable way one against another. When they first arrive, in January, they are left to the ordinary atmospheric temperature for some months. Their rates being taken under these circumstances, a large stove in the center of the apartment is lighted, and heat got up to a sort of artificial East India or Gold Coast point. Tried under these influences, they are placed in an iron tray over the stove, like so many watch-pies in a baker's dish, and the fire being encouraged, they are literally kept baking, to see how their metal will stand that style of treatment. While thus hot, their rates are once more taken; and then, after this fiery ordeal, such of them as their owners like to trust to an opposite test, are put into freezing mixtures! Yet, so beautifully made are these triumphs of human ingenuity – so well is their mechanism 'corrected' for compensating the expansion caused by the heat, and the contraction induced by the cold – that an even rate of going is established, so nearly, that its variation under opposite circumstances becomes a matter of close and certain estimate.

The rates of chronometers on trial for purchase by the Board of Admirality, at the Observatory, are posted up and printed in an official form. Upon looking to the document for last year, we find a statement of their performances during six months of 1849, with memoranda of the exact weeks during which the chronometers were exposed to the open air at a north window; the weeks the Chronometer-room was heated by a stove, the chronometers being dispersed on the surrounding shelves; and the weeks during which they were placed in the tray above the stove. The rate given during the first week of trial is in every case omitted; like newly entered schoolboys their early vagaries are not taken into account; but after that, every merit and every fault is watched with jealous care, and, when the day of judgment comes, the order of the arrangement of the chronometers in the list is determined solely by consideration of their irregularities of rate as expressed in the columns, "Difference between greatest and least," and, "Greatest difference between one week and the next."

The Royal Observatory, according to a superstition not wholly extinct, is the head-quarters, not only of Astronomy, but of Astrology. The structure is awfully regarded, by a small section of the community which ignorance has still left among us, as a manufactory of horoscopes, and a repository for magic mirrors and divining-rods. Not long ago a well-dressed woman called at the Observatory gate to request a hint as to the means of recovering a lost sum of money; and recently, somebody at Brighton dispatched the liberal sum of five shillings in a post-office order to the same place, with a request to have his nativity cast in return! Another, only last year, wrote as follows: "I have been informed that there are persons at the Observatory who will, by my inclosing a remittance and the hour of my birth, give me to understand who is to be my wife? An early answer, stating all particulars, will oblige," &c.

This sketch descriptive of its real duties and uses are not necessary to relieve the Greenwich Observatory from the charge of being an abode of sorcerers and astrologers. A few only of the most ignorant can yet entertain such notions of its character; but they are not wholly unfounded. Magicians, whose symbols are the Arabic numerals, and whose arcana are mathematical computations, daily foretell events in that building with unerring certainty. They pre-discover the future of the stars down to their minutest evolution and eccentricity. From data furnished from the Royal Observatory, is compiled an extraordinary prophetic Almanack from which all other almanacks are copied. It foretells to a second when and where each of the planets may be seen in the heavens at any minute for the next three years. The current number of the Nautical Almanack is for the Year of Grace 1853.

In this quiet sanctuary, then, the winds are made to register their own course and force, and the rain to gauge its own quantity as it falls; the planets are watched to help the mariner to steer more safely over the seas; and the heavens themselves are investigated for materials from which their future as well as their past history may be written.

RAPID GROWTH OF AMERICA

Every one who visits America has something to say of the rapidity with which towns spring up in the West. Sir Charles Lyell, however, mentions some facts which remind us very forcibly how close to our own times was the settlement of the first English colony upon the continent. At Plymouth he sees the tombs of the first pilgrims, who came out in the Mayflower. Some of the houses which they built of brick brought from Holland, are still remaining, with their low rooms and paneled walls. In some private houses he saw many venerated heir-looms, kept as relics of the first settlers; among others, an antique chair of carved wood, which came over in the Mayflower, and which still retains the marks of the staples which fixed it to the floor of the cabin. He also saw a chest, or cabinet, which had belonged to Peregrine White, the first child born in the colony. Part of the rock upon which the pilgrim fathers landed has been removed to the centre of the town, and, with the names of forty-two of their number inscribed upon it, inclosed within an iron railing. This is the American Roll of Battle Abbey. But to return to Peregrine White, the first child born in the colony: Colonel Perkins, the munificent founder of the asylum for the blind, where we found our friend Laura Bridgman, informed Sir Charles Lyell, in 1846, "that there was but one link wanting in the chain of personal communication between himself and Peregrine White." White was known to a man of the name of Cobb, whom Colonel Perkins visited, in 1807, with some friends, who still survive. This Cobb remembered when there were many Indians near Plymouth; the inhabitants of the town frequently firing a cannon to frighten them, to which cannon the Indians gave the name of "Old Speakum." So that, in this case, one link is sufficient to connect men now alive with the first whites born in New England, and with the time when Indians were in the neighborhood of the first town that was settled.

As a pendant to this, we may mention something connected with the originals of that other continent which our race is peopling at the antipodes. A few weeks ago, we were dining at the table of a naval officer, well known in the scientific and literary world, upon which occasion he mentioned, that being off the infant town of Sydney, in New South Wales, in the year 1806, he ate some of the first home-bred bullock which was killed in the colony. The son of the first governor having just returned from the colony, which he had now made his home, happening to be of our party, added, that "since that time their progress had been so rapid, that this year they were to melt down two million sheep for their tallow."

There are three events in the history of the world which will bear comparison with this rapid extension of the English race. The first – and this has always appeared to us to be the most striking occurrence in history – is the marvelous manner in which a handful of Greeks, under Alexander and his successors, overran and held for a long period the whole of the East. The wonder is increased when we consider the difficulty of maintaining communications in that part of the world. They, in a great measure, changed the language and ideas of the East. The Gospel was written in Greek; and the law of Moses, the writings of the Hebrew prophets, were translated into Greek on the banks of the Nile. A Greek kingdom was ever able to maintain itself for a long period of time on the very confines of Tartary; and specimens of the Græco-Bactrian coinage are even to this day abundant in that part of the world. All this, however, passed away, and has not left any very obvious traces on the present state of things. The second event was the establishment of the Roman empire. Strongly as we are disposed to maintain that, on a general view of human affairs, every thing happens for the best, yet we may say of the Roman empire that it was in many respects a giant evil. No man of great original genius ever spoke the Roman language; in the sense in which many Greeks, and among ourselves Bacon, Shakspeare, and Newton, were men of original genius. There was a time when there were men of spirit and ability in every Greek city: there was a time when the Roman empire governed the world and there was not one great man from Britain to the Euphrates. Having fulfilled its destiny – which seems to have been the introduction into the Western World of the ideas of unity, law, and order, though unintentionally on its part, for it was nothing but a military despotism – it perished as it deserved, and its language is now nowhere spoken.

The third event was the irruption of the Barbarians. That a higher civilization followed this every body knows; but how many centuries did it take to civilize the Barbarians?

Now these, the three great events of past history, are all dwarfed very much when compared with what we are now, doing. We are sending out every year, literally, hundreds of thousands of civilized men to people two continents in opposite hemispheres, and on opposite sides of the globe. In North America there are already twenty millions of our race. This population doubles every twenty-two years. Australia will inevitably become "the Queen of the South." Now that literature has given permanency to language, no other tongue than ours will ever be spoken upon these continents. We can see no limit to the spread of our laws, literature, and language. Greek and Roman greatness are really, in comparison, nothing to this. And, compared with the millions of civilized men which we have sent and are sending to occupy so large a portion of the earth's surface, how insignificant becomes the irruption of some savage, or half-savage hordes, into Italy, France, Spain, and England!

At a time when civilization is at a standstill, if not retrograding, upon the continent of Europe, it is very delightful, particularly to an Englishman, to have such a picture to contemplate. —Frazer's Magazine.

[From the London Times.]

LORD COKE AND LORD BACON

Lord Campbell has devoted a considerable portion of his first volume of the Lives of the Chief Justices of England to the biography of Sir Edward Coke. The theme is worthy of the space afforded it. Independently of the professional renown of this great man, there are circumstances connected with his career that render it, perhaps, more deeply interesting than that of any other legal functionary. He began the world with the immortal Bacon; the two were rivals during life; they fought together for distinction, and were even competitors in love. Both were devoured by a raging desire for wealth and honors, both gained the objects of their fiery ambition, and neither found happiness when they were acquired. If Bacon was more unscrupulous than Coke in the ignoble race, his fall also was more fatal and ignominious. Both represent to our minds distinct forms of undoubted greatness. The Body of the Common Law of England is the type that speaks for Coke. The glory of human wisdom shines forever around the drooping head of Bacon. Both teach posterity how much intellectual grandeur may co-exist with the most glaring moral turpitude; both pay homage to virtue by seeking refuge in disgrace in the tranquil pursuits that have since immortalized them. Bacon, with a genius only less than angelic, condescends to paltry crime, and dies branded. Coke, with a profound contempt for the arts that Bacon loved, enraged by disappointment, takes revenge for neglect, and dies a patriot. In the days of Coke there would seem to have been a general understanding on the part of royal sycophants to mislead the monarch, and all became his sycophants who received his favors. Coke is no exception to the rule. It is true enough that to him we are mainly indebted for the movement which, beginning on the 30th of January, 1621, ended that very day eight-and-twenty years with the decapitation of the king; but it is likewise undeniable that the nation's difficulties would have waited some time longer for solution had not the defender of the people's rights been inoculated with a love of liberty by the sudden application of the royal lancet, whose sharp edge his judicious self-love would never have provoked. Coke was born in what a Royalist of the days of Charles the First might well have called "the good old times," when Queens were gentle despots and Parliaments the most devoted of self-constituted slaves; when Mr. Speaker "upon his allegiance was commanded, if a certain bill be exhibited, not to read it," and when "Mr. Vice-Chamberlain, to the great comfort of the Speaker and the House, brought answer of Her Majesty's acceptance of the submission" of legislators who had presumed to speak of matters "not proper and pertinent for the house to deal in." Elizabeth was on her splendid throne when Coke, having quitted the University of Cambridge without a degree, was working like a horse at Clifford's-inn. Stony-hearted and stony-minded, he loved neither poetry nor pleasure. From the moment he began the appointed task of his life, he dreamed of nothing but fame, and of that only for the sake of the sterling recompense it brings. Friendships not convertible to cash, Coke resolutely foreswore at the commencement of his career, and he was blessed with none at the close of it. Spenser yielded him no delight, Shakespeare no seduction. The study of law began at three in the morning, and, with short intervals of rest, ceased at nine in the evening, at which hour the indefatigable student at last took repose. Fortified by such discipline, and brim full of law, Coke was called to the bar in the year 1578, being then twenty-seven years of age, and he rose in his profession as rapidly as he had all along resolved to rise.

In pursuance of his design Coke married well in 1582; the lady was young, beautiful, and accomplished; virtues thrown, as it were, into the bargain, since the lawyer had been well satisfied with the ample fortune by which they were accompanied. Before he was thirty years old the desperate money-seeker had made himself master of manor upon manor, and laid the foundation of the enormous possessions which at length alarmed the Crown, lest they should prove too magnificent for a subject. In 1585 he was elected Recorder of Coventry, in 1586 of Norwich, and in 1592 of London itself. In the last-named year he was also appointed Reader in the Inner Temple by the Benchers, and in 1592, being in his forty-first year, by the influence of Burleigh, he was made Solicitor-General to the Queen. The solicitorship secured the Speakership of the House of Commons, according to custom. Coke in his address to the Queen upon his appointment compared himself to a star in the heavens, "which is but opacum corpus until it receiveth light from the sun." Her Majesty in answer graciously condescended to accept the metaphor, for she informed her humble Speaker that liberty of speech was granted him, "but you must know what privilege you have; not to speak every one what he listeth, or what cometh in his brain to utter, but your privilege is ay or no; wherefore, Mr. Speaker, Her Majesty's pleasure is, that if you perceive any idle heads which will meddle with reforming the church and transforming the commonwealth, and do exhibit bills to such purpose, you receive them not until they be viewed and considered by those who it is fitter should consider of such things, and can better judge of them." The times were sweetly Arcadian. Elizabeth should be painted a shepherdess, and her faithful Parliament a meek and timid flock about her.

The obsequiousness of Coke to his Royal mistress was in perfect keeping with his character. Nothing exceeds his abject servility while in the sunshine, save his fixed malignity when dismissed to the shade. In 1594 the office of Attorney-General became vacant; Coke regarded the prize as his own until he found one ready to dispute it with him. Bacon, eager to outstrip his rival, had made interest at Court, and, had his age been as ripe as his genius, Coke might have been thrust aside in the encounter. Intrigues failed, because "one precedent of so raw a youth being promoted to so great a place" it was impossible to find. Coke was left master of the field, but neither combatant forgot the result of the contest. The new Attorney-General declined his marvelous opponent for Solicitor-General, and Bacon resolved to take unmeasured revenge both for the disappointment and the insult.

A fitter tool for its melancholy work prerogative never found than in Attorney-General Coke, who, for his punishment, lived to destroy the foul abuses he had been paid to nourish. The liberty of the subject is identified with the name of the individual who, as much as any of his time, sought to crush it. The perversions of criminal law to which this man condescended, as prosecutor for the Crown, are familiar to the readers of history. His cruel arrogance and atrocious bearing toward the unfortunate (we do not speak of the guilty) can never be forgotten. Lord Campbell tells us that Coke, in his age, "made noble amends" for the licentious and unscrupulous dealings of his earlier life. We can not admit the term; for repentance to be noble, the motive must be pure. The gain to society by the stand made by Coke, in the name of the people, against the encroachments of the Crown is not to be overestimated; but respect does not attach to the soiled instrument by which our blessings were secured. A singular instance of the brutality of the Attorney-General, and of his overstrained duty to the Crown, occurred at the trial of the unfortunate and gallant Essex. Well may the present biographer exclaim, "This was a humiliating day for our order!" Essex had striven hard to obtain for Bacon the office then held by his accuser. The insurrection in the city might sooner be pardoned than that offense, which, indeed, received no mercy. For once, Bacon and Coke ceased to be rivals, but only that they might be co-partners in inexpiable guilt. Divines may preach even to the infidel of the inherent rottenness of our fallen nature, when they can point to Bacon, the pride of humanity, the wonder of the civilized world, imploring to be counsel against his best friend and benefactor, and leaving no base means untried to bring that high and chivalrous spirit to the scaffold. Prerogative never boasted so rare a sacrifice; the might of kings never extorted so signal an acknowledgment.

On the 27th of June, 1598, Coke lost his wife, who had borne him ten children. His memorandum-book feelingly describes the virtues of the departed; but within four months of her burial the disconsolate widower had taken unto himself a second mate, whose beauty, though extraordinary, was still surpassed, as before, by the brilliancy of the marriage portion. Lady Hatton, daughter of Thomas Cecil, was the widow of the nephew of Lord Chancellor Hatton, and but 20 years of age when she agreed to become the wife of a man whom she disliked on her wedding-day and hated ever afterward. Bacon, her cousin, had preferred his suit to be rejected, although Lord Essex, then powerful enough, had declared to the lady that "if he had a daughter of his own he would rather match her with the accomplished lawyer than with a man of far greater titles." To spite Bacon, and to add to his heaps, Coke consented to a private marriage, to break the law, and to listen complacently to the openly declared aversion of his bride. He enjoyed all the happiness he had earned. The lady refused to adopt her husband's name, spurned his company and dry pursuits, took her pleasure abroad, and, giving birth to a daughter, flatly refused to live with him any longer; and greater punishment came hereafter.

Upon the death of Elizabeth, James I. conferred upon Coke the dignity of knighthood, and continued him in his office. The first appearance of the Attorney-General as public prosecutor in the new reign was at the trial of the adventurous Raleigh, the judge upon the occasion being the reformed highway-robber, Popham, who made amends for the delinquencies of his youth by hanging every criminal within his reach. Raleigh laid down the law as Coke himself years afterward knew how to define it; but the legal tools of the Court were neither to be shamed nor argued from their purpose. Coke disgracefully bullied the high-souled prisoner. Popham shrunk from his calm and unanswerable defense; but both contrived to prove him guilty. The instance is one of a hundred. So long as Coke could find payment for unclean work, he betrayed no uneasy desire to wash his fingers. It was not until all hope of turning sycophancy to further account was gone that he took up with patriotism.

Coke's last prosecution as Attorney-General was a famous one; for the objects of his malevolence were no other than Guy Faux and his accomplices. It would have been sufficient to dismiss in silence to the scaffold men upon whom the brand of guilt was so deeply fixed. Justice required no more than their death; much more readily satisfied the officious love of the king's devoted servant. While the Attorney-General was hurling insult at the heads of the culprits, one of them, Sir Everard Digby, interrupted him, confessing "that he deserved the vilest death, and the most severe punishment that might be," but humbly petitioned "for mercy and some moderation of justice." Coke, overflowing with mercy, promised him such moderation as he might discover in the Psalms, where it is written, "Let his wife be a widow and his children vagabonds – let his posterity be destroyed, and in the next generation let his name be quite put out." Digby's pathetic appeal upon the rising of the Court may well stand side by side with this brutality. "If I may but hear any of your lordships," exclaimed the doomed man, "say you forgive me, I shall go more cheerfully to the gallows." The lords answered in Coke's presence, "The Lord forgive you, and we do."

The gunpowder plot disposed of, Coke, in the year 1606, became Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, "fatigued," as Lord Campbell has it, "if not satiated, with amassing money at the bar." The new judge was as fully alive to the rights of his office as he had been before to the prerogatives of the king. The pedantic presumption of James was safe till it rubbed against the more stubborn pride of Coke. The monarch was of opinion that the constitution and the law allowed him personally to try causes between his loyal subjects. "By my soul," he said pettishly to Coke, who begged leave to differ, "I have often heard the boast that your English law was founded upon reason. If that be so, why have not I and others reason as well as you, the judges?" Coke explained why and by the manner of his explanation compelled the king to think no more of his folly. Unfortunately for all parties His Majesty at the same time remembered the affront.

Had he been disposed to forget it there was one at his side eager enough to jog his memory. Bacon's advancement depended upon the downfall of Coke, and the sublimest yet meanest of men gave his whole heart to the accomplishment of either work. By the elevation of the Attorney-General, Bacon had become Solicitor-General, and a more servile spirit never filled the office. The first triumph of Coke over the king encouraged him to more open war against despotism and abuse. The monarchs before the Revolution loved to repair laws by royal proclamation, and none were busier at that trade than the silly James. Coke asserted his authority again, and again defeated him. To console His Majesty and to help himself, Bacon recommended the promotion of the incorrigable assailant. Coke was made, accordingly, Chief Justice of the King's Bench. The profits of the office were much less than those of the Justice of the Common Pleas, although the rank was higher. Hence Coke's disgust at the bettering of his condition, which also helped Bacon on a step, by furnishing Attorney-General Hobart with the chiefship of the Common Pleas.

Coke continued to display his independence during the three years that he presided in the Court of King's Bench, but he had stopped short of committing an act that might deprive him of the reversion of the Chancellorship, to which his great acquirements and reputation well entitled him. Bacon, always alive to his master's interests, urged upon the king the danger of elevating the Chief Justice to the woolsack, long before the vacancy occurred. "If you take my Lord Coke," said he, "this will follow: first, your Majesty shall put an overruling nature into an overruling place, which may breed an extreme; next, you shall blunt his industries in the matter of your finances, which seemeth to aim at another place (the office of Lord Treasurer); and, lastly, popular men are no sure mounters for your Majesty's saddle." His Majesty, easily frightened, cherished the warning, while Coke took no pains to disarm suspicion. His triumphs gave him courage, and he went from bad to worse. A question arose as to the power of the king to grant ecclesiastical preferments to be held along with a bishopric. A learned counsel at the bar denied the power. Bacon, the Attorney-General, not caring to defend it, mentioned another power of the king's – viz., his right to prohibit the hearing of any cause in which his prerogative is concerned until he should intimate his pleasure on the matter to his judges; and advised such a prohibition to be issued in the case in question. Coke treated the advice with disdain, proceeded as with an ordinary cause, heard it, and judicially determined it. Bacon could have wished for nothing more suicidal.

Coke was summoned before the Privy Council. It was suddenly discovered that he had been guilty of a breach of duty while Attorney-General, in concealing a bond given to the Crown by Sir Christopher Hatton. He had also misconducted himself in a dispute with the Lord Chancellor respecting injunctions; moreover, he had insulted the king when called before him in the case of commendams. In addition, many extravagant and exorbitant opinions had been set down and published in his reports for positive and good law. So heinous an offender could not go unpunished. By royal mandate the delinquent was suspended from his office of Chief Justice. Simple suspension, however, brought no consolation to Bacon, who goaded the king to downright persecution. On the 16th of November, 1616, the Chief Justice received his dismissal. Lord Campbell pleads for the fallen man, who heard his sentence with "dejection and tears." We must, nevertheless, not forget the weakness when we reflect upon his abject submission to royalty during his days of dependence, and as we approach the more stormy times when the spirit of vengeance incited him to grapple with royalty in the temper of a rebel. Magnanimity is wanting throughout.

As Coke tumbled down Bacon rose to his zenith. While the former was shedding tears for his dismissal, the latter was intoxicated with joy by his elevation to the Chancellorship. The defeated judge, however, was not the man to submit without a struggle to his fate. By his second wife he had a daughter: she had reached a marriageable age and was heiress to a princely fortune. Coke resolved that she should marry Sir John Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham's eldest brother. Sir John was very poor, and the Duke of Buckingham all powerful. The union effected, what should hinder his return to favor? Bacon, terrified at the plot, encouraged mother and daughter to resist the will of the father; but Sir John and the duke were more than a match for the counter-conspirators. After a gallant opposition the ladies yielded, and the marriage was celebrated at Hampton Court, "in the presence of the king and queen and all the chief nobility of England." Sir John was old enough to be his wife's father, but that was a trifle. The results of the match were such as might be expected. Coke was restored to the Privy Council, but received no judicial promotion. Sir John Villiers and his wife never passed a happy day together, and before long the lady eloped with Sir John Howard. "After traveling abroad in man's attire she died young, leaving a son, who, on the ground of illegitimacy, was not allowed to inherit the estate and honors of her husband."

The last blow decided the ex-Chief Justice. Rejected as a friend, he gave himself up to the warfare of relentless enmity. The fame and glory acquired at this juncture by his rival in consequence of the publication of the Novum Organum gave venom to his hate. A Parliament was called in 1620. Coke then in his 70th year, was elected for the borough of Liskeard. Just after his election the office of Lord Treasurer fell vacant. Coke had looked for it, but it was given elsewhere. All things served to fan the fire of his indignation. The Puritans were returned to the House in great numbers. Coke, hitherto a high churchman, placed himself at their head, and prepared for deadly opposition. Opportunities came to him as thick as summer leaves upon a tree. The nation had rare cause for discontent, and no man knew better than he how to turn popular grievances to personal account.

He set to work at once. A motion was made by Mr. Secretary Calvert for a supply. Sir Edward Coke moved as an amendment, "That supply and grievances should be referred together to a committee of the whole House." The amendment was carried, and business forthwith commenced with an attack upon the monopolists. A report was drawn up directed against the king's prerogative, in virtue of which monopolies flourished, and Coke himself carried it to the bar of the Upper House, where Bacon, as Chancellor received him. The second effort must have been a labor of love indeed. The Lord Chancellor himself had been accused of a king bribes. A committee of the House was appointed to investigate the charges, and Coke, with a willing heart, guided its proceedings. The king sent a message to the Commons with the view of saving Bacon from the odium of an inquiry thus vindictively pursued, but Coke had fastened on his prey and was not to be cajoled or frightened off. He besought the Commons not to stand between justice and a huge delinquent, and he procured Bacon's impeachment. The impeachment being voted, Coke, to his intense delight, was ordered to conduct it. Bacon, conscious of the spirit with which his rival would settle to his task, disappointed his vengence by pleading guilty to the charge; but it was the deep humiliation of the chancellor, in the presence of his foe, to hear in one breath both judgement and destruction pronounced. The battle was over. Bacon made restitution to society by withdrawing from public life and devoting himself to the dignified occupations which have since induced his countrymen to forget the failings that compelled the fortunate seclusion. Coke having brought his victim to the dust left him there to linger. He never visited his fallen enemy. The two never met again.

Revenge called for further sacrifice. Coke's fierceness against the Court increased rather than abated with Bacon's removal. The Chancellorship which might have made him a royalist and high churchman again was bestowed upon another. The shortsightedness of monarchs is even more unpardonable than their crimes. After a struggle against adjournment, led on by Coke, Parliament was adjourned in May to meet again in November. In a letter to the Speaker the king desired it to be made known in his name unto the House, "that none therein shall presume henceforth to meddle with any thing concerning our Government or deep matters of state." Coke, leading the opposition, moved "a protestation," which was carried and entered on the journals. The king, with his own hand, tore the protestation out of the Journal Book, and declaring it "an usurpation which the majesty of a king can by no means endure" at once dissolved the Parliament.

Coke for his pains was committed to the Tower, but after a few months' imprisonment was released at the intercession of the Prince of Wales. Before the popular leader was fairly in harness again, that Prince was on the throne. Charles's first Parliament was called in 1625, and Coke was returned for Coventry. A motion for supply being submitted, Coke moved as an amendment for a committee to inquire into the expenditure of the Crown. The amendment was carried, and His Majesty, according to custom in such cases, dissolved the Parliament. Supply being, however, indispensable to monarchs as to meaner men, a new Parliament was summoned, and Coke, now 75 years old, was returned without solicitation for Norfolk. This Parliament fared no better than its predecessor, and upon another attempt being made the king suffered the extreme mortification of seeing his unappeasable pursuer returned for two counties. His Majesty opened the session with a stern rebuke. He did not call it a threatening, "for he scorned to threaten any but his equals, but an admonition from him who by nature and duty has most care of his people's preservation and prosperity." Whatever it might be, whether menace or reproof, it had no effect upon the sturdy veteran. "What a word," exclaimed Coke in his speech upon the usual motion for supply "is that franchise! The lord may tax his villein, high or low; but it is against the franchise of the land for freemen to be taxed but by their consent in Parliament;" and the speaker implored his listeners to withhold that consent while there remained one legitimate grievance for the king to remedy. Having made his speech he brought forward and carried resolutions that are memorable in the annals of our constitutional history, and which, indeed, were made the foundation of the Habeas Corpus Act fifty years afterward. His next step was his greatest. He formed the famous Petition of Right, the second Magna Charta, as it has been aptly called, of the nation's liberties. The petition enumerated all the abuses of prerogative under which the country groaned, and after declaring them all to be contrary to law "assumed the form of an act of the Legislature, and in the most express and stringent terms protected the people in all time to come from similar oppressions." The king attempted to evade the obligation about to be forced upon him, but his adversary was as inflexible as iron, "not that he distrusted the king, but that he could not take his trust save in a Parliamentary way." The lords passed the bill, but loyally introduced a proviso that completely nullified its operation. "This," exclaimed Coke, "turns all about again," and at his instigation the accommodating proviso was at once rejected. The Lords agreed "not to insist upon it," and nothing was left for His Majesty but to resort, under the direction of Buckingham, to fraudulent dealing. The trick did not answer. Buckingham was denounced, the Petition of Right, in spite of the king, received the royal assent in due form, and bonfires throughout London testified to the happiness of the people at the restoration of their liberty. King Charles would never have died on the scaffold had he not violated in later years the solemn pledge he gave on this occasion to his trusting subjects.

With this achievement ended Coke's political career. The Petition of Right was carried in 1628. He was absent from Parliament during the short and violent session of 1629, and before another Parliament was called he had quitted life. He died in 1634, in the eighty-third year of his age and in the full possession of his faculties. What he performed for public liberty is seen; his claims to esteem as a lawyer were recognized in his own time, and are still acknowledged. His publications are the hand-books of our legal men. His general character may be gathered from our short record. It is further to be noted that he had a sublime contempt for science and literature of every kind. Upon the title-page of his copy of the Novum Organum, presented to him by the author, he wrote,

"It deserves not to be read in schooles,
But to be freighted in the Ship of Fools."