every wife as the mere sub-tenant of a husband's affection.

Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, was now the Queen's favorite. He was handsome, brave, impulsive and headstrong; generous to his friends and followers, jealous of, and unjust to, his rivals. His relations with the Queen were a compound of comedy and tragedy.

Now fondling an old woman's bony hand, next rebelling against an old woman's bad temper; while she, on her part, to-day admitted him to the familiarity of a lover, and to-morrow required the obedience of a subject and obsequiousness of a courtier. Sometimes she granted his most extravagant demands; at others refused his most reasonable requests.

His ambition was insatiate. The Queen had conferred military honors and offices upon him which were envied by veteran soldiers; and now, at the age of twenty-three, he entered the lists against Burghley for civil employment, influence and power.

It was at this period of the Earl's career that the friendship between him and Bacon reached its height. About the same time, the intrigues of Spain with Scotland inspired the summoning of a parliament; which was informed by the Lord Keeper, the Queen being present, that supplies were wanted to confront the threatening dangers; that there was no need of new laws, the superfluity of old ones requiring abridgment.

The admirers of Bacon point, with pardonable pride, to the fact that he seized the opportunity for a speech on law reform, in respect to which he was far in advance of his contemporaries.

He was a law-maker as well as lawyer, and suggested

improvements which tardy legislation has, within comparatively recent times, adopted.

His second speech in this parliament had a serious. influence upon his after-life. The demand of the Queen was, after an altercation between the two houses, responded to by a motion for the grant of an unprecedented supply, collectable in a brief period.

Bacon, in a moment of impulsive patriotism, or, willing to resent the neglect he had suffered at the hands of the government, spoke against the motion, and said, "It is impossible; the poor men's rent is such as they are not able to yield it, and the general commonalty is not able to pay so much upon the present. The gentlemen must sell their plate, and the farmers their brass pots ere this will be paid."

Such language was strange to the time and the place. It was paralleled by Colepepper, speaking of monopolists, in the Long Parliament, when he said, "They sup in our cup; they dip in our dish; they sit by our fire; we find them in the dye-fat, the wash-bowls, and the powdering-tub." Hence, it must have electrified Bacon's contemporaries, stricken Burghley dumb, and loosened the Queen's tongue, and made her profanely voluble.

She conveyed her displeasure to the nephew through his too-willing uncle; and Bacon replied, in a letter to Burghley, in which he claims the inspiration of the best motives for his speech, and begs him to continue him in his good opinion, "to perform the part of an honest friend towards your poor servant and ally, in drawing Her Majesty to accept of the sincerity and simplicity of my heart, and to bear with the rest, and restore me to Her Majesty's favor."

If it be just to test a man's sincerity by contrasting his conduct in after-life, and under similar circumstances, with a position formerly assumed, Bacon's sympathy for the poor would appear to have been assumed, and his respect for precedents affected. In the parliament of 1601, when the largest grant ever received by the Queen was voted, Bacon opposed a proposition to exempt the poor tax-payer,-"the threepound men," and said "it was dulcis tractus pari jugo, and therefore the poor, as well as the rich, not to be exempted." In other words, he answered his own early arguments, and voted against his own early principles.

After having been rendered unhappy by the Queen's anger, and consequent exile from her presence, it seems that he contemplated some change in his life, which, however, was not carried into execution, because of the disapproval of Essex, to whom Bacon yielded, "because it is the best wisdom in any man, in his own matters, to rest in the wisdom of a friend; but, also, because my affection to your Lordship hath made mine own contentment inseparable from your satisfaction."

In the meantime, Bacon was embarrassed by a, limited income and unlimited debts.

His

"If a young man has parts and poverty he can get along at the bar," says an old English judge. Bacon was provided with these prerequisites, but had no success in his profession commensurate with his abilities. He was a little Cosmos of contradictions. heart was enslaved by philosophy, yet the tool of an office-seeking ambition. He sighed for a contemplative life, while aspiring to a prominent place among his busiest contemporaries.

Amid contradictory desires and embarrassing surroundings, instead of centering his hopes and endeavors in a single direction, he was subservient to every breeze which seemed to blow from a favorable quarter. In 1593 a vacancy was about to occur in the office of Attorney-General; and Bacon, an almost briefless barrister, at the age of thirty-three, fixed his eye upon the place. Essex probably encouraged him with assurances more sanguine than certain.

The candidate's experience discouraged him from addressing Burghley directly, so he sought to propitiate the Lord Treasurer's sons,-Sir Thomas and Sir Robert Cecil. His letter to his cousin Robert, whom he calls "your honor," is in an humble strain, and is replied to in a frank, friendly form, as insincere as Bacon's.

Essex, with characteristic generosity, became his warmest advocate with the Queen. Bacon wrote Elizabeth a letter of a manly tone, which contained an assurance that if his friends pressed his suit his spirit was not with them,- an assurance irreconcilable with the facts, incompatible with the truth.

Nothing but the friendly enthusiasm of Essex could have excused his application to an unforgiving woman with an unforgetting faculty, for a favor such as he now asked. And, as might have been expected, she confronted his friend with the speech against granting the Queen what she most needed in a perilous situation.

Sir Edward Coke, Bacon's life-long rival, was made Attorney-General, in spite of the "uttermost credit, friendship and authority" which Essex, as favorite and a Privy-Councillor, pledged in Bacon's behalf.

A fresh scent was taken up as soon as the old was

dropped, by Bacon pursuing the Solicitor-Generalship.

He received the same hearty support from Essex, and more encouragement from other influential men who had access to the Queen. In a letter, thanking Essex, he repeats his threat of retirement to private life, and devotion to studies and contemplation; but, with this inviting and, to Bacon, appropriate career before him, he descends to the ignoble suggestions of a place-hunter. "The objection to my competitors your Lordship knoweth partly. I pray, spare them not, not over the Queen, but to the great ones, to show your confidence, and work their distaste."

The Queen postponed the selection of a SolicitorGeneral, but became reconciled sufficiently to employ Bacon as Counsel-Extraordinary, sending him on a journey at his own cost, which compelled him to call his brother Anthony's better credit in play, to borrow the wherewithal to meet his travelling expenses.

He was halted by sudden illness. From his sickroom he wrote to the Queen: "Most gracious and admirable Sovereign, as I do acknowledge a providence of God towards me that findeth it expedient for me tolerare jugum in juventate mea, so this present arrest of me by His Divine Majesty, from your Majesty's service, is not the least affliction I have proved," etc., bringing the two sovereignties in a juxtaposition, as he repeatedly did afterwards in royal correspondence, in a manner shocking to all sense of propriety.

Without fulfilling his mission, he returned to London, having, on the way, received the degree of Master of Arts from Cambridge. He closed the year in writing the part of a discourse touching the safety of the Queen