NOTE BBBB. 



obedience despond, and refuse to make some few years trial in this place? 

 Nor, Tuus, O Jacobe, quod optas explorare labor, mihi jussa capessere fas est. I 

 will therefore conclude this point with the excuse of that poet, whom the Em 

 peror Gratian would needs enforce to set out his poem, whether he would or no, 

 Non habeo ingenium, Caesar sed jussit habebo. Cur mue posse negem, posse 

 quod ille putet. I am no way fit for this great place, but because God and the 

 king will have it so, I will endeavour, as much as I can, to make myself fit, and 

 put my whole confidence in his grace and mercy, Qui neminem dignum eligit, 

 sed eligendo dignum facit, as St. Austin speaks. And so much of my calling, 

 now I come unto my carriage in this place. 



&quot;It is an observation which fully makes, In causis direndis effugere solebat 

 Antonius, ne succederet Crasso. Antonius was ever afraid to come after 

 Crassus, a most eloquent and powerful orator. And the greatest discouragement 

 I find in this place is, that I am to come after (after, indeed, nee passibus zequis) 

 my two immediate predecessors, the one of them excellent in most things, the 

 other in all things. But both of them so bred in this course of life, Ut illis 

 plurimarum rerum agitatio frequens, nihil esse ignotum patiebatur : as Pliny 

 speaks -of the pleaders of his times. It were too much to expect at my hands, a 

 man bred in other studies, that readiness, or quickness, or dispatch which was 

 effected by them, Lords, both of them brought up in the King s courts, and not 

 in the King s chapel. My comfort is this, that arriving here as a stranger, I may 

 say as Archimedes did when he found those geometrical lines and angles drawn 

 everywhere in the sands of Egypt, Video vestigia humana : I see in this court 

 the footsteps of wise men, many excellent rules and orders for the managing the 

 same, the which, though I might want learning and knowledge to invent, (if 

 they were not thus offered to my hands) yet I hope I shall not want the honesty 

 to act and put in execution, these rules I will precisely follow, without the 

 least deflexion at all, until experience shall teach me better. Every thing by 

 the course of nature hath a certain and regular motion. The air and fire still 

 upward, the earth and water fall downward : The celestial bodies whirl about 

 in one and the self same course and circularity, and so should every court of 

 justice, otherwise it grows presently to be had in jealousy and suspicion. For 

 as Vel. Paterculus observes very well, In iis homines extraordinaria reformi- 

 dant, qui modum in voluntate habent. Men ever suspect the worst of those 

 rules which vary, with the judge s will and pleasure. I will descend to some 

 few particulars. 



&quot; First, I will never make any decree that shall cross the grounds of the 

 common or statute laws ; for I hold by my place the custody not of mine own, 

 but of the King s conscience : and it were most absurd to let the King s con 

 science be at enmity and opposition with his laws and statutes. This court (as 

 I conceive it) may be often occasioned to open and confirm, but never to 

 thwart and oppose the grounds of the laws. I will therefore omit no pains of 

 mine own, nor conference with the learned judges, to furnish myself with com 

 petency of knowledge, to keep my resolution in this point firm and inviolable. 

 Secondly, I will never give a willing ear to any motion made at this bar, which 

 shall not apparently tend to further and hasten the hearing of the cause. The 

 very word motion, derived a movendo, to move, doth teach us that the hearing 

 is, Finis, perfectio, &c. terminem ad quem, the end, perfection, and proper 

 home, as it were, of the matter propounded. If a counsellor, therefore, will 

 needs endeavour, as Velleius writes of the Gracchi, Optimo ingenio pessime 

 uti, to make that bad use of a good wit, as to justle a cause out of the King s 

 highway, which I hold in this court to be bill, answer, replication, rejoinder, 

 examination and hearing, I will ever regard it as a wild-goose chase, and not a 

 learned motion. The further a man runs out of his way, the further he is from 

 home, the end of his journey, as Seneca speaks : so the more a man tattles 

 besides these points, the further it is from the nature of a motion. Such a motion 

 is a motion. Per Antiphrasin, ut mons a non movendo. It tends to nothing but 

 certamen ingenii, a combat of wit, which is infinite and endless. For when it 

 once comes to that pass, some will sooner a great deal lose the cause than the 

 last word. Thirdly, I would have no man to conceive that I come to this place 



