Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/91

Rh unknown personally to the other. One person made a link between them, the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakspere dedicated Venus and Adonis, in 1593, 'the first heir of his invention.' Five years later Southampton lost the Queen's favor by marrying without her consent, Elizabeth Vernon, the Earl of Essex's cousin. He was obliged to absent himself from Court, and we hear of him in 1599 as "passing his time in London merely in going to plays every day." Bacon knew Southampton as a friend to the Earl of Essex, and acted as Queen 's counsel in prosecuting him for his complicity in Essex's treasonable practices. Later in James the First's reign, Bacon was associated with the Earl of Southampton on the board of governors of the South Virginia Company. But Southampton would seem not to have forgotten Bacon's share in Essex's death and his own imprisonment, for when Lord Chancellor Bacon was charged with corruption before the House of Lords, it was the Earl of Southampton who drove the charges home by insisting on a particular confession. The patron of Shakspere in youth did not befriend Bacon in age. Doubtless a sufficient explanation of Bacon's unconsciousness of the local drama that was being written and acted all about him is that as a reader he preferred the classics. Nor, indeed, was he an omnivorous reader, though he had read much. He was a man who read the best books and read them thoroughly. Moreover, as a man of affairs rather than a mere bookish person, he thought about what Rh