inued unaltered. Essex pressed Bacon's claims
whenever a chance offered. He did his best to get Bacon a rich wife--the
young widow of Sir Christopher Hatton--but in vain. Instead of Bacon she
accepted Coke, and became famous afterwards in the great family quarrel,
in which Coke and Bacon again found themselves face to face, and which
nearly ruined Bacon before the time. Bacon worked for Essex when he was
wanted, and gave the advice which a shrewd and cautious friend would
give to a man who, by his success and increasing pride and
self-confidence, was running into serious dangers, arming against
himself deadly foes, and exposing himself to the chances of fortune.
Bacon was nervous about Essex's capacity for war, a capacity which
perhaps was not proved, even by the most brilliant exploit of the time,
the capture of Cadiz, in which Essex foreshadowed the heroic but
well-calculated audacities of Nelson and Cochrane, and showed himself as
little able as they to bear the intoxication of success, and to work in
concert with envious and unfriendly associates. At the end of the year
1596, the year in which Essex had won such reputation at Cadiz, Bacon
wrote him a letter of advice and remonstrance. It is a lively picture
of the defects and dangers of Essex's behaviour as the Queen's
favourite; and it is a most characteristic and worldly-wise summary of
the ways which Bacon would have him take, to cure the one and escape the
other. Bacon had, as he says, "good reason to think that the Earl's
fortune comprehended his own." And the letter may perhaps be taken as an
indirect warning to Essex that Bacon must, at any rate, take care of his
own fortune, if the Earl persisted in dangerous courses. Bacon shows how
he is to remove the impressions, strong in the Queen's mind, of Essex's
defects; how he is, by due submissions and stratagems, to catch her
humour--

"But whether I counsel you the best, or for the best, duty bindeth
me to offer to you my wishes. I said to your Lordship last time,
_Martha, Martha, attendis ad plurima, unum sufficit_; win the
Queen: if this be not the beginning, of any other course I see no
end."

Bacon gives a series of minute directions how Essex is to disarm the
Queen's suspicions, and to neutralize the advantage which his rivals
take of them; how he is to remove "the opinion of his nature being
_opiniastre_ and not rulable;" how, avoiding the faults of Leicester and
Hatton, he is, a