beth, and also in that of her private life and more
intimate feelings. The powerful faction of which the favorite had been
the head, acknowledged a new leader in the earl of Essex, whom his
step-father had brought forward at court as a counterpoise to the
influence of Raleigh, and who now stood second to none in the good
graces of her majesty. But Essex, however gifted with noble and
brilliant qualities totally deficient in Leicester, was on the other
hand confessedly inferior to him in several other endowments still more
essential to the leader of a court party. Though not void of art, he was
by no means master of the profound dissimulation, the exquisite address,
and especially the wary coolness by which his predecessor well knew how
to accomplish his ends in despite of all opposition. His character was
impetuous, his natural disposition frank; and experience had not yet
taught him to distrust either himself or others.

With the friendships, Essex received as an inheritance the enmities also
of Leicester, and no one at court could have entertained the least doubt
whom he regarded as his principal opponent; but it would have been
deemed too high a pitch of presumption in so young a man and so recent a
favorite as Essex, to place himself in immediate and open hostility to
the long established and far extending influence of Burleigh. With this
great minister therefore and his adherents he attempted at first a kind
of compromise, and the noted division of the court into the Essex and
the Cecil parties does not appear to have taken place till some years
after the period of which we are treating. Meantime, the death of
Walsingham afforded the lord-treasurer an occasion of introducing to the
notice and confidence of her majesty, and eventually to the important
office of secretary of state, his son Robert, whose transcendent talents
for affairs, joined to the utmost refinement of intrigue and duplicity,
immediately established him in the same independence on the good will of
the new favorite, as the elder Cecil had ever asserted on that of the
former one; and appears finally to have enabled him to prepare in secret
that favorite's disastrous fall.

With regard to Elizabeth herself, it has been a thousand times remarked,
that she was never able to forget the woman in the sovereign; and in
spite of that preponderating love of sway which all her life forbade her
to admit a partner of her bed and throne, her heart was to the last