Page:The house of Cecil.djvu/196

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168
THE CECILS
and you that hath an extraordinary judgment by Hisgifts that doth all must with that wisdom seek now to master your good and kind nature and to think that sorrow nor anything else can now redeem it. And as she is now most assured happier than all we that live in this 'pudeled' and troubled world, so do I assure you, as long as God shall spare me life in it, there shall not be any tread on the earth that shall love you better than my poor self; and I vow it to God I think none doth or can do so much as I do."[1]

But it was long before the Secretary could rouse himself from his grief, and in June his aunt, Lady Russell, found it necessary to give him a characteristic exhortation:—

"If you be so without comfort of worldly delight as you seem, it is most ill to the health of your both body and soul; I speak by experience, and know too well that to be true which I say; and, therefore, both am sorry to hear it, and beseech the God of all consolation and comfort to remedy it, with giving you a contrary mind. Else will you find the Daemonius meridianus to creep so far into your heart, with his variety of virtues, seeming good to be yielded to (melancholy I mean) as in the end will shorten life by cumbrous conceits and sickness: and when it is rooted so as with peevish persuasions of good thereby and solitary ejaculations, it will bring forth the fruit of stupidity, forgetfulness of your natural disposition of sweet and apt speeches, fit for your place: and instead thereof breed and make you a surly, sharp, sour plum, no better than in truth a very melancholy mole and a misanthropos hateful to God and man; and only with persuasions seeming holy, wise and good."[2]

Although Cecil had been transacting the

  1. January 25th, 1597 (Hatfield MSS., VII. 39).
  2. Ibid., VII. 281.