By the urbane placidity which marked the utterance of his happiest speeches, Sir Nicholas Bacon often recalled to his hearers the courteous easiness of More's _repartees_. Keeping his own pace in society, as well as in the Court of Chancery, neither satire nor importunity could ruffle or confuse him. When Elizabeth, looking disdainfully at his modest country mansion, told him that the place was too small, he answered with the flattery of gratitude, "Not so, madam, your highness has made me too great for my house." Leicester having suddenly asked him his opinion of two aspirants for court favor, he responded on the spur of the moment, "By my troth, my lord, the one is a grave councillor: the other is a proper young man, and so he will be as long as he lives." To the queen, who pressed him for his sentiments respecting the effect of monopolies--a delicate question for a subject to speak his mind upon--he answered, with conciliatory lightness, "Madam, will you have me speak the truth? _Licentiâ_ omnes deteriores sumus." In court he used to say, "Let us stay a little, that we may have done the sooner." But notwithstanding his deliberation and the stutter that hindered his utterances, he could be quicker than the quickest, and sharper than the most acrid, as the loquacious barrister discovered who was suddenly checked in a course of pert talkativeness by this tart remark from the stammering Lord Keeper: "There is a difference between you and me,--for me it is a pain to s-speak, for you a pain to hold your tongue." That the familiar story of his fatal attack of cold is altogether true one cannot well believe, for it seems highly improbable that the Lord Keeper, in his seventieth year, would have sat down to be shaved near an open window in the month of February. But though the anecdote may not be historically exact, it may be accepted as a faithful portraiture of his more stately and severely courteous humor. "Why did you suffer me to sleep thus exposed?" asked the Lord Keeper, waking in a fit of shivering from slumber into which his servant had allowed him to drop, as he sat to be shaved in a place where there was a sharp current of air. "Sir, I durst not disturb you," answered the punctilious valet, with a lowly obeisance. Having eyed him for a few seconds, Sir Nicholas rose and said, "By your civility I lose my life." Whereupon the Lord Keeper retired to the bed from which he never rose.