the scale against Essex.  In April, 1594, Coke was made Attorney.  Coke did not forget the pretender to law, as he would think him, who had dared so long to dispute his claims; and Bacon was deeply wounded.  “No man,” he thought, “had ever received a more exquisite disgrace,” and he spoke of retiring to Cambridge “to spend the rest of his life in his studies and contemplations.”  But Essex was not discouraged.  He next pressed eagerly for the Solicitorship.  Again, after much waiting, he was foiled.  An inferior man was put over Bacon’s head.  Bacon found that Essex, who could do most things, for some reason could not do this.  He himself, too, had pressed his suit with the greatest importunity on the Queen, on Burghley, on Cecil, on every one who could help him; he reminded the Queen how many years ago it was since he first kissed her hand in her service, and ever since had used his wits to please; but it was all in vain.  For once he lost patience.  He was angry with Essex; the Queen’s anger with Essex had, he thought, recoiled on his friend.  He was angry with the Queen; she held his long waiting cheap; she played with him and amused herself with delay; he would go abroad, and he “knew her Majesty’s nature, that she neither careth though the whole surname of the Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither.”  He was very angry with Robert Cecil; affecting not to believe them, he tells him stories he has heard of his corrupt and underhand dealing.  He writes almost a farewell letter of ceremonious but ambiguous thanks to Lord Burghley, hoping that he would impute any offence that Bacon might have given to the “complexion of a suitor, and a tired sea-sick suitor,” and speaking despairingly of his future success in the law.  The humiliations of what a suitor has to go through torment him:  “It is my luck,” he writes to Cecil, “still to be akin to such things as I neither like in nature nor would willingly meet with in my course, but yet cannot avoid without show of base timorousness or else of unkind or suspicious strangeness.”  And to his friend Fulke Greville he thus unburdens himself: 

“SIR,—­I understand of your pains to have visited me, for which I thank you.  My matter is an endless question.  I assure you I had said Requiesce anima mea; but I now am otherwise put to my psalter; Nolite confidere.  I dare go no further.  Her Majesty had by set speech more than once assured me of her intention to call me to her service, which I could not understand but of the place I had been named to.  And now whether invidus homo hoc fecit; or whether my matter must be an appendix to my Lord of Essex suit; or whether her Majesty, pretending to prove my ability, meaneth but to take advantage of some errors which, like enough, at one time or other I may commit; or what is it? but her Majesty is not ready to despatch it.  And what though the Master of the Rolls, and my Lord of Essex, and yourself, and others, think my case without doubt, yet in the meantime