ROBERT DEVEREUX,

EARL OF ESSEX.

THAT admirable, imprudent, and ill-fated nobleman of the same names, almost the only royal favourite on whose memory that appellation throws no discredit, left, by his Countess, Frances, daughter and heir to Sir Francis Walsingham, and widow of Sir Philip Sidney, an only son, the subject of this memoir, and the third and last Earl of Essex of his ancient Norman House.

He was born in 1592, and was restored in the twelfth year of his age by James the First to the dignities, as he was afterwards to the estates, which had been forfeited by his father's attainder, soon after which period he was removed from Eton school to Merton College, where in 1605 he took the degree of Master of Arts. He is said to have been at that time a favourite companion to Prince Henry, and a story, perhaps not very well authenticated, is extant of the Prince having received a heavy blow from him in a quarrel at tennis, a circumstance into which the King inquired with becoming seriousness, and decided on it with good sense and moderation. In this season of mere boyhood he was unhappily chosen as an instrument for the reconciliation of jarring interests, and the furtherance of ambitious views. The enmity between his father and the family of Cecil is well known to all readers of English history. Robert, Earl of Salisbury, now Prime Minister, at once anxious to close this breach, and to attach more firmly the House of Howard to his party, proposed to the Earl of Suffolk, a nobleman hourly rising in the royal