In the twelfth century was there any mind that shone more brightly, was there any eloquence which flowed more mightily, than that of Peter Abelard?
Yet Abelard sank beneath the meanest of his scholastic cotemporaries in the degradation of his career as much as he towered above the highest of them in the grandeur of his genius.

In the seventeenth century was there any philosopher more profound, any moralist more elevated, than Francis Bacon?
Yet Bacon could flatter a tyrant, and betray a friend, and receive a bribe, and be one of the latest of English judges to adopt the brutal expedient of enforcing confession by the exercise of torture.

If Seneca defended the murder of Agrippina, Bacon blackened the character of Essex.

"What I would I do not; but the thing that I would not, that I do," might be the motto for many a confession of the sins of genius; and Seneca need not blush if we compare him with men who were his equals in intellectual power, but whose "means of grace," whose privileges, whose knowledge of the truth, were infinitely higher than his own.

Let the noble constancy of his death shed a light over his memory which may dissipate something of those dark shades which rest on portions of his history.