George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

[141] aristocracy of wealth, had to sustain itself between

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the people on one side, and the monarch on the other. The ‘nobility’ was, in his view, the ‘rock’ of ‘English principles;’¹ the power of the peerage, and of arbitrary monarchy, were ‘as two buckets, of which one goes down exactly as the other goes up.’² In the people of England, as the depository of power and freedom, Shaftesbury had no confidence; his system protected wealth and privilege; and he desired to deposit the conservative principles of society in the exclusive custody of the favored classes. Cromwell had proposed, and Vane had advocated, a reform in parliament; Shaftesbury hardly showed a disposition to diminish the influence of the nobility over the lower house.³

Such were the political principles of Shaftesbury; and his personal character was analogous. He loved wealth without being a slave to avarice; and, though he would have made no scruple of ‘robbing the devil or the altar,’⁴ he would not pervert the course of judgment, or be bribed into the abandonment of his convictions.⁵ If, as lord chancellor, he sometimes received a present, his judgment was never suspected of a bias. Quick to discern the right, and careless of precedents, usages, and bar-rules, he was prompt to render an equitable decision. Every body applauded but the lawyers; they censured the contempt of ancient forms; the diminished weight of authority, and the neglect of legal erudition; the historians, the