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 I have a hard condition, to stand so that whatsoever
service I do to her Majesty it shall be thought to be but
_servitium viscatum_, lime-twigs and fetches to place myself; and
so I shall have envy, not thanks. This is a course to quench all
good spirits, and to corrupt every man's nature, which will, I
fear, much hurt her Majesty's service in the end. I have been like
a piece of stuff bespoken in the shop; and if her Majesty will not
take me, it may be the selling by parcels will be more gainful. For
to be, as I told you, like a child following a bird, which when he
is nearest flieth away and lighteth a little before, and then the
child after it again, and so _in infinitum_, I am weary of it; as
also of wearying my good friends, of whom, nevertheless, I hope in
one course or other gratefully to deserve. And so, not forgetting
your business, I leave to trouble you with this idle letter; being
but _justa et moderata querimonia_; for indeed I do confess,
_primus amor_ will not easily be cast off. And thus again I commend
me to you."

After one more effort the chase was given up, at least for the moment;
for