sonal beauty and considerable wealth,
thought this broken-hearted widower at the age of forty-six, would be
good enough for him, and the weeks since the true handmaid of the Lord
had left him desolate were only just beginning to blend into months,
when he fixed his mind upon a girl likely to fulfil his very moderate
requirements. He, a widower, naturally sought a widow, and, happily,
he found a newly made one. Youth she had, for she was only twenty;
beauty she must have had in a remarkable degree, for she was
afterwards one of the lovely girls selected to act with the Queen of
James I. in Ben Jonson's _Masque of Beauty_; and wealth she had in the
shape of immense estates.

Elizabeth, grand-daughter of the great Lord Burghley, and daughter of
Burghley's eldest son Thomas Cecil, some years later Earl of Exeter,
had been married to the nephew and heir of Lord Chancellor Hatton. Not
very long after her marriage her husband had died, leaving her
childless and possessed of the large property which he had inherited
from his uncle. This young widow was a woman not only of high birth,
great riches, and exceptional beauty, but also of remarkable wit, and,
as if all this were not enough, she had, in addition, a violent temper
and an obstinate will. This Coke found out in her conduct respecting a
daughter who eventually became Lady Purbeck, the heroine of our little
story.

Romance was not wanting in the Attorney-General's second wooing; for
he had a rival, whom Lord Campbell in his _Lives of the Chief
Justices_, describes as "then a briefless barrister, but with
brilliant prospects," a man of thirty-five, who happened to be Lady
Elizabeth's cousin. His name was Francis Bacon, afterwards Lord
Chancellor, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and the author of the
_Novum Organum_ as well of a host of other works, including essays on
almost every conceivable subject. In the opinion of certain people, he
was also the author of the plays commonly attributed to one William
Shakespeare. This rival was good-looking, had a charming manner, and
was brilliant in conversation, while his range of subjects was almost
unlimited, whereas, the wooer in whom we take such an affectionate
interest, was wrinkled, dull, narrow-minded, unimaginative, selfish,
over-bearing, arrogant, illiterate, ignorant in almost everything
except jurisprudence, of which he was the greatest oracle then living,
and uninterested in everything except law, his own personal