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.