for Essex; and it is certain that he would have had to reckon with the terrible lady who in her old age still ruled England from the throne of Henry VIII., and who had certainly no great love for Bacon himself.  She had already shown him in a much smaller matter what was the forfeit to be paid for any resistance to her will.  All the hopes of his life must perish; all the grudging and suspicious favours which he had won with such unremitting toil and patient waiting would be sacrificed, and he would henceforth live under the wrath of those who never forgave.  And whatever he did for himself, he believed that he was serving Essex.  His scheming imagination and his indefatigable pen were at work.  He tried strange indirect methods; he invented a correspondence between his brother and Essex, which was to fall into the Queen’s hands in order to soften her wrath and show her Essex’s most secret feelings.  When the Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, “though I profess not to be a poet,” he “prepared a sonnet tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty’s reconcilement to my Lord.”  It was an awkward thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the counsels of those who hated him.  He complains that many people thought him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and that stories circulated to his disadvantage, as if he were poisoning the Queen’s ear against Essex.  But he might argue fairly enough that, wilful and wrong-headed as Essex had been, it was the best that he could now do for him; and as long as it was only a question of Essex’s disgrace and enforced absence from Court, Bacon could not be bound to give up the prospects of his life—­indeed, his public duty as a subordinate servant of government—­on account of his friend’s inexcusable and dangerous follies.  Essex did not see it so, and in the subjoined correspondence had the advantage; but Bacon’s position, though a higher one might be imagined, where men had been such friends as these two men had been, is quite a defensible one: 

“MY LORD,—­No man can better expound my doings than your Lordship, which maketh me need to say the less.  Only I humbly pray you to believe that I aspire to the conscience and commendation first of bonus civis, which with us is a good and true servant to the Queen, and next of bonus vir, that is an honest man.  I desire your Lordship also to think that though I confess I love some things much better than I love your Lordship—­as the Queen’s service, her quiet and contentment, her honour, her favour, the good of my country, and the like—­yet I love few persons better than yourself, both for gratitude’s sake and for your own virtues, which cannot hurt but by accident or abuse.  Of which my good affection I was ever ready and am ready to yield testimony by any good offices, but with such reservations as yourself cannot but allow; for as I was ever sorry that your Lordship should fly with waxen wings, doubting Icarus’s