But it may be urged that Bacon plead guilty to corruption and bribery. He did nothing of the kind. He acknowledged that he "partook of the abuses of the times," and that the existing customs should be reformed; but he solemnly declared to Buckingham, May 31, 1621: "I have been a trusty and honest and Christ-loving friend to your lordship and the justest chancellor that hath been in the five charges since my father's time." Again, he said: "I had no bribe or reward in my eye or thought when I pronounced any sentence or order.... I take myself to be as innocent as any babe born on St. Innocent's day in my heart." All attempts to subsequently reverse his decrees failed, although his enemies were in possession of power. But King James urged him to make no defence, "to trust his honor and his safety to the crown.... He pleads guilty to carelessness, not to crime." He desired to live to finish up his philosophical works. To resist the king's wishes was to leave himself at the mercy of his life-long enemy, Coke; he yielded. The king remitted his fine of L40,000 and released him from the Tower. Bacon goes back to his books and writes in cipher: "I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years; but it was the justest censure that was in Parliament these two hundred years." He meant thereby, that while personally innocent of corruption, the sentence would end gift-giving to judges. His formal confession to Parliament is a justification of every act complained of, for he relieves it, while acknowledging it, of those details which imply bribery. He devoted the last five years of his life to putting forth the greatest works ever published by man; including the first complete edition of the so-called Shakespeare plays. Fortunate is it for the world that he was driven from the task of settling petty squabbles about the trash of the time, listening to "weary lawyers with endless tongues;" adjudicating questions of pounds, shillings, and pence between litigants whose very names have disappeared; and was shipwrecked by the stress of the great storm that struck him, like _Prospero_, on an island of solicitude, with books that "he prized above his dukedom," to perform labors in which all mankind will be interested even to the consummation of civilization on earth. His patience, his gentleness, his forbearance were saint-like; still in his right hand he carried "gentle peace to silence envious tongues." His appearance, we are told, struck all men who beheld him with a great sense of awe. Those who were most closely associated with him loved him most dearly. His purposes were Godlike. They were "the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." Macaulay says of Bacon's experimental philosophy: