And it seemed as if Essex would have the ability as well as the wish.  Essex was, without exception, the most brilliant man who ever appeared at Elizabeth’s Court, and it seemed as if he were going to be the most powerful.  Leicester was dead.  Burghley was growing old, and indisposed for the adventures and levity which, with all her grand power of ruling, Elizabeth loved.  She needed a favourite, and Essex was unfortunately marked out for what she wanted.  He had Leicester’s fascination, without his mean and cruel selfishness.  He was as generous, as gallant, as quick to descry all great things in art and life, as Philip Sidney, with more vigour and fitness for active life than Sidney.  He had not Raleigh’s sad, dark depths of thought, but he had a daring courage equal to Raleigh’s, without Raleigh’s cynical contempt for mercy and honour.  He had every personal advantage requisite for a time when intellect, and ready wit, and high-tempered valour, and personal beauty, and skill in affairs, with equal skill in amusements, were expected to go together in the accomplished courtier.  And Essex was a man not merely to be courted and admired, to shine and dazzle, but to be loved.  Elizabeth, with her strange and perverse emotional constitution, loved him, if she ever loved any one.  Every one who served him loved him; and he was, as much as any one could be in those days, a popular favourite.  Under better fortune he might have risen to a great height of character; in Elizabeth’s Court he was fated to be ruined.

For in that Court all the qualities in him which needed control received daily stimulus, and his ardour and high-aiming temper turned into impatience and restless irritability.  He had a mistress who was at one time in the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another as an outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and most imperious of queens; her mood varied, no one could tell how, and it was most dangerous to mistake it.  It was part of her pleasure to find in her favourite a spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, as her own; it was the charming contrast to the obsequiousness or the prudence of the rest; but no one could be sure at what unlooked-for moment, and how fiercely, she might resent in earnest a display of what she had herself encouraged.  Essex was ruined for all real greatness by having to suit himself to this bewildering and most unwholesome and degrading waywardness.  She taught him to think himself irresistible in opinion and in claims; she amused herself in teaching him how completely he was mistaken.  Alternately spoiled and crossed, he learned to be exacting, unreasonable, absurd in his pettish resentments or brooding sullenness.  He learned to think that she must be dealt with by the same methods which she herself employed.  The effect was not produced in a moment; it was the result of a courtiership of sixteen years.  But it ended in corrupting a noble nature.  Essex came to believe that she who cowed others must be