nical contempt for mercy and honour. He
had every personal advantage requisite for a time when intellect, and
ready wit, and high-tempered valour, and personal beauty, and skill in
affairs, with equal skill in amusements, were expected to go together in
the accomplished courtier. And Essex was a man not merely to be courted
and admired, to shine and dazzle, but to be loved. Elizabeth, with her
strange and perverse emotional constitution, loved him, if she ever
loved any one. Every one who served him loved him; and he was, as much
as any one could be in those days, a popular favourite. Under better
fortune he might have risen to a great height of character; in
Elizabeth's Court he was fated to be ruined.

For in that Court all the qualities in him which needed control received
daily stimulus, and his ardour and high-aiming temper turned into
impatience and restless irritability. He had a mistress who was at one
time in the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another as an
outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and most imperious of
queens; her mood varied, no one could tell how, and it was most
dangerous to mistake it. It was part of her pleasure to find in her
favourite a spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, as
her own; it was the charming contrast to the obsequiousness or the
prudence of the rest; but no one could be sure at what unlooked-for
moment, and how fiercely, she might resent in earnest a display of what
she had herself encouraged. Essex was ruined for all real greatness by
having to suit himself to this bewildering and most unwholesome and
degrading waywardness. She taught him to think himself irresistible in
opinion and in claims; she amused herself in teaching him how completely
he was mistaken. Alternately spoiled and crossed, he learned to be
exacting, unreasonable, absurd in his pettish resentments or brooding
sullenness. He learned to think that she must be dealt with by the same
methods which she herself employed. The effect was not produced in a
moment; it was the result of a courtiership of sixteen years. But it
ended in corrupting a noble nature. Essex came to believe that she who
cowed others must be frightened herself; that the stinging injustice
which led a proud man to expect, only to see how he would behave when
refused, deserved to be brought to reason by a counter-buffet as rough
as her own insolent caprice. He drifted into discontent, into
disaffection, in