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"The elegant perspicuity," the conciseness, the quick strong reasonings, and the engaging good breeding of his letters, carry great marks of genius.-Yet his youth gave no promise of parts; his father died with a mean opinion of him3. The malicious subtleties of an able court, were an over-match for his impetuous spirit: yet he was far from wanting art; but was so confident of the queen's partiality, that he did not bend to her as his enemies did, who had not the same hold on her tender passions.

• Biographia Britannica.

[Or, according to sir Henry Wotton, with a very cold conceit of him; some say, through his affection to his second son Walter Devereux, who was indeed a diamond of his time, and both of a kindly and delicate temper and mixture. But it seems the earl, like certain vegetables, did bud and open slowly; nature sometimes delighting to play an after-game as well as fortune, which had both their turns and tides in course. At the age of sixteen, as Mr. Seward has stated, he took the degree of M. A. at Cambridge, and kept his public act. Anecd. vol. v. p. 25. His posthumous eulogist, Robert Pricket, thus speaks also of his progressive acquirements, in his very scarce poetic pamphlet on the earl's life and death, purchased from major Pearson's library by Mr. Malone.

Even from his youth, till years of riper strength,

In Vertues schoole a studious life he spent;
His honors thoughts desir'd and gain'd, at length,
Minerva's food, the sweet of his content:

Apollo deckt his muse in silver shrine,

And wrapt in gold his goulden thoughts divine.

Honors Fame in Triumph riding, &c. 1604.]

He trusted to being always able to master her by absenting himself: his enemies embraced those moments to ruin him. I am aware that it is become a mode to treat the queen's passion for him as a romance. Voltaire laughs at it, and observes, that "when her struggle about him must have been the greatest (the time of his death) she was sixty-eight-had he been sixtyeight, it is probable she would not have been in love with him." As a great deal turns upon this point, and as there are the strongest presumptions of the reality of her majesty's inclination for him, I shall take leave to enter into the discussion.

I do not date this passion from her first sight of him, nor impute his immediate rise to it, as some have done, who did not observe how nearly he was related to the queen, as appears by the following short table:

THOMAS BOLEYN, EARL OF WILTSHIRE.

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His mother being cousin to the queen, and wife of her great favourite Leicester, easily accounted for young Essex's sudden promotion: it went on rapidly without those supports. At twenty he was made master of the horse; the next year general of the horse at the camp at Tilbury, and knight of the garter. On these dignities were afterwards heaped the great posts of master of the ordnance, earl marshal, chan cellor of Cambridge, and lord lieutenant of Ireland.-Lofty distinctions from a princess so sparing of her favours-of what she was still more sparing, he obtained to the value of 300,00015. In one of her letters, she reproached him with her great favours bestowed without his desert in every instance but in his and Leicester's, she was not wont to overpay services".

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[In reference to this honour, Pricket says,

When creeping time had brought to manhood's yeers
This honored bud, al-glorious in his spring,

Then as the sunne from forth a cloude appears,
And doth his light with greater brightnes bring;

So did this prince: his thoughts majesticall
Made him to be great Lester's generall.

Greate majestie, and wisedomes queene,
Would say his like was never seene.]

So lord treasurer Buckhurst computed. Vide sir Henry Wotton's Parallel, p. 175. [And this sum he received "in pure gift," besides the fees of his offices, and the disposition of great sums of money in the army.]

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