ng, and preserved it with the utmost care.

Friendship between persons of such impetuous and excitable temperaments
as Elizabeth and Essex both possessed, though usually very ardent for a
time, is very precarious and uncertain in duration. After various
petulant and brief disputes, which were easily reconciled, there came at
length a serious quarrel. There was, at that time, great difficulty in
Ireland; a rebellion had broken out, in fact, which was fomented and
encouraged by Spanish influence. Essex was one day urging very strongly
the appointment of one of his friends to take the command there, while
the queen was disposed to appoint another person. Essex urged his views
and wishes with much importunity, and when he found that the queen was
determined not to yield, he turned his back upon her in a contemptuous
and angry manner. The queen lost patience in her turn, and, advancing
rapidly to him, her eyes sparkling with extreme resentment and
displeasure, she gave him a severe box on the ear, telling him, at the
same time, to "go and be hanged." Essex was exceedingly enraged; he
clasped the handle of his sword, but was immediately seized by the other
courtiers present. They, however, soon released their hold upon him, and
he walked off out of the apartment, saying that he could not and would
not bear such an insult as that. He would not have endured it, he said,
from King Henry the Eighth himself. The name of King Henry the Eighth,
in those days, was the symbol and personification of the highest
possible human grandeur.

The friends of Essex among the courtiers endeavored to soothe and calm
him, and to persuade him to apologize to the queen, and seek a
reconciliation. They told him that, whether right or wrong, he ought to
yield; for in contests with the law or with a prince, a man, they said,
ought, if wrong, to submit himself to _justice_; if right, to
_necessity_; in either case, it was his duty to submit.

This was very good philosophy; but Essex was not in a state of mind to
listen to philosophy. He wrote a reply to the friend who had counseled
him as above, that "the queen had the temper of a flint; that she had
treated him with such extreme injustice and cruelty so many times that
his patience was exhausted, and he would bear it no longer. He knew well
enough what duties he owed the queen as an earl and grand marshal of
England, but he did not understand being cuffed and beaten like a menial
servant; and that h