and cruel, Essex as incorrigibly and outrageously wilful, proud, and undutiful, Bacon himself as using every effort and device to appease the Queen’s anger and suspiciousness, and to bring Essex to a wiser and humbler mind.  The picture is indeed a vivid one, and full of dramatic force, of an unrelenting and merciless mistress bent on breaking and bowing down to the dust the haughty spirit of a once-loved but rebellious favourite, whom, though he has deeply offended, she yet wishes to bring once more under her yoke; and of the calm, keen-witted looker-on, watching the dangerous game, not without personal interest, but with undisturbed presence of mind, and doing his best to avert an irreparable and fatal breach.  How far he honestly did his best for his misguided friend we can only know from his own report; but there is no reason to think that he did Essex ill service, though he notices in passing an allegation that the Queen in one of her angry fits had charged him with this.  But his interest clearly was to make up the quarrel between the Queen and Essex.  Bacon would have been a greater man with both of them if he had been able to do so.  He had been too deeply in Essex’s intimacy to make his new position of mediator, with a strong bias on the Queen’s side, quite safe and easy for a man of honourable mind; but a cool-judging and prudent man may well have acted as he represents himself acting without forgetting what he owed to his friend.  Till the last great moment of trial there is a good deal to be said for Bacon:  a man keenly alive to Essex’s faults, with a strong sense of what he owed to the Queen and the State, and with his own reasonable chances of rising greatly prejudiced by Essex’s folly.  But at length came the crisis which showed the man, and threw light on all that had passed before, when he was picked out, out of his regular place, to be charged with the task of bringing home the capital charge against Essex.  He does not say he hesitated.  He does not say that he asked to be excused the terrible office.  He did not flinch as the minister of vengeance for those who required that Essex should die.  He did his work, we are told by his admiring biographer, better than Coke, and repaired the blunders of the prosecution.  He passes over very shortly this part of the business:  “It was laid upon me with the rest of my fellows;” yet it is the knot and key of the whole, as far as his own character is concerned.  Bacon had his public duty:  his public duty may have compelled him to stand apart from Essex.  But it was his interest, it was no part of his public duty, which required him to accept the task of accuser of his friend, and in his friend’s direst need calmly to drive home a well-directed stroke that should extinguish chances and hopes, and make his ruin certain.  No one who reads his anxious letters about preferment and the Queen’s favour, about his disappointed hopes, about his straitened means and distress for money, about his difficulties with his creditors—­he was twice arrested for debt—­can doubt that the question was between his own prospects and his friend; and that to his own interest he sacrificed his friend and his own honour.