Of political moderation, if it means merely steering a middle course between two extremes, the praise is cheap, and would be shared by Falkland with many weak and with many dishonest men. It may, without disparagement, be remarked of him that his rank as a nobleman was almost sufficient in itself, without any special soundness of understanding or calmness of temperament, to prevent him from throwing himself headlong either into an absolutist reaction which was identified with the ascendency of upstart favourites, and contemners of the old nobility, or into a popular revolution which soon disclosed its tendency to come into collision with the privileged order, and which ended its parricidal career by leaving England, during some of the most glorious years of her history, destitute of a House of Lords. But as an adherent, and no doubt a deliberate adherent, of Constitutional Monarchy, Falkland was in that which in the upshot proved to be the right line of English progress, though by no means the right line of progress for the whole world. The Commonwealth is the ideal of America, where it is practicable, and it alone. Constitutional Monarchy, as Falkland rightly judged, was the highest attainable ideal for England, at any rate in that day. Of attaining that ideal, of doing anything considerable towards its attainment, or towards its defence against the powers of absolutist reaction whose triumph would have rendered its attainment for ever impossible, he was no more capable than he was of performing the labours of Hercules. In this he bears some resemblance to a man of incomparably greater intellect than his. The fame of Bacon as a philosopher has eclipsed his importance as a politician. But his ideal of an enlightened monarchy, invested with plenary power, but always using its power in conformity with law, and having a Verulam at its right hand, not only is grand and worthy of the majestic intelligence from which it sprang, but is entitled to a good deal of sympathy, when we consider how wanting in enlightenment, how rough, how uncertain, how provoking to a trained and instructed statesman the action of parliaments composed of country gentlemen and meeting at long intervals, in an age when there were no political newspapers or other general organs of political information, could not fail sometimes to be. But Bacon, hampered by enfeebling selfishness, as Falkland was by more generous defects, was incapable of taking a single step toward the realization of his august vision, and the result was, a miserable fall from the ethereal height to the feet of a Somerset and a Buckingham.