If they had been, they would not have been old. This therefore, like many of Lord Bacon's illustrations, has more wit than meaning. But it is a good trick of rhetoric. The vividness of the image, 'per se', makes men overlook the imperfection of the simile. "You see my hand, the hand of a poor, puny fellow-mortal; and will you pretend not to see the hand of Providence in this business? He who sees a mouse must be wilfully blind if he does not see an elephant!" Ib. s. 100. The error of the first James,--an ever well-intending, well-resolving, but, alas! ill-performing monarch, a kind-hearted, affectionate, and fondling old man, really and extensively learned, yea, and as far as quick wit and a shrewd judgment go to the making up of wisdom, wise in his generation, and a pedant by the right of pedantry, conceded at that time to all men of learning (Bacon for example),--his error, I say, consisted in the notion, that because the stalk and foliage were originally contained in the seed, and were derived from it, therefore they remained so in point of right after their evolution. The kingly power was the seed; the House of Commons and the municipal charters and privileges the stock of foliage; the unity of the realm, or what we mean by the constitution, is the root. Meanwhile the seed is gone, and reappears as the crown and glorious flower of the plant. But James, in my honest judgment, was an angel compared with his son and grandsons. As Williams to Laud, so James I was to Charles I. Ib. Restraint is not a medicine to cure epidemical diseases. A most judicious remark. Ib. s. 103. The least connivance in the world towards the person of a Papist. It is clear to us that this illegal or 'præter'-legal and desultory toleration by connivance at particular cases,--this precarious depending on the momentary mood of the King, and this in a stretch of a questioned prerogative,--could neither satisfy nor conciliate the Roman-Catholic potentates abroad, but was sure to offend and alarm the Protestants at home. Yet on the other hand, it is unfair as well as unwise to censure the men of an age for want of that which was above their age. The true principle, much more the practicable rules, of toleration were in James's time obscure to the wisest; but by the many, laity no less than clergy, would have been denounced as soul-murder and disguised atheism. In fact--and a melancholy fact it is,--toleration then first becomes practicable when indifference has deprived it of all merit. In the same spirit I excuse the opposite party, the Puritans and Papaphobists. Ib. s. 104.