While Bacon, in the shade, had been laying the foundations of his
philosophy of nature, and vainly suing for legal or political
employment, another man had been steadily rising in the Queen's favour
and carrying all before him at Court--Robert Devereux, Lord Essex; and
with Essex Bacon had formed an acquaintance which had ripened into an
intimate and affectionate friendship. We commonly think of Essex as a
vain and insolent favourite, who did ill the greatest work given him to
do--the reduction of Ireland; who did it ill from some unexplained
reason of spite and mischief; and who, when called to account for it,
broke out into senseless and idle rebellion. This was the end. But he
was not always thus. He began life with great gifts and noble ends; he
was a serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books and
things, and he turned his studies to full account. He had imagination
and love of enterprise, which gave him an insight into Bacon's ideas
such as none of Bacon's contemporaries had. He was a man of simple and
earnest religion; he sympathized most with the Puritans, because they
were serious and because they were hardly used. Those who most condemn
him acknowledge his nobleness and generosity of nature. Bacon in after
days, when all was over between them, spoke of him as a man always
_patientissimus veri_; "the more plainly and frankly you shall deal with
my lord," he writes elsewhere, "not only in disclosing particulars, but
in giving him _caveats_ and admonishing him of any error which in this
action he may commit (such is his lordship's nature), the better he will
take it." "He must have seemed," says Mr. Spedding, a little too
grandly, "in the eyes of Bacon like the hope of the world." The two men,
certainly, became warmly attached. Their friendship came to be one of
the closest kind, full of mutual services, and of genuine affection on
both sides. It was not the relation of a great patron and useful
dependant; it was, what might be expected in the two men, that of