and I have no desire to be." Bacon's contemporary and cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, who was principal secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth and James I., and ultimately lord high treasurer, when he was acknowledged to be the ablest, as he appeared the most enviable, statesman of his time, wrote to a friend, "Give heed to one that hath sorrowed in the bright lustre of a court and gone heavily over the best seeming fair ground. It is a great task to prove one's honesty, and yet not spoil one's fortune.... I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me; I know it bringeth little comfort on earth; and he is, I reckon, no wise man that looketh this way to heaven." Bacon himself says, in one of his Essays, "Certainly great persons have need to borrow other men's opinions to think themselves happy; for if they judge by their own feeling they cannot find it; but if they think with themselves what others think of them, and that other men would fain be as they are, then they are happy as it were by report, when, perhaps, they find the contrary within; for they are the first that find their own griefs, though they be the last that find their own faults." Madame de Stael, surrounded by the most brilliant men of genius, beloved by a host of faithful and devoted friends, the centre of a circle of unsurpassed attractions, was yet doomed to mourn "the solitude of life." A short time before her death, she said to Chateaubriand, "I am now what I have always been--lively and sad." The illustrious Madame Recamier, "after forty years of unchallenged queenship in French society, constantly enveloped in an intoxicating incense of admiration and love won not less by her goodness and purity than by her beauty and grace," writes thus from Dieppe to her niece: "I am here in the centre of fetes, princesses, illuminations, spectacles. Two of my windows face the ball-room, the other two front the theatre. Amidst this clatter I am in a perfect solitude. I sit and muse on the shore of the ocean. I go over all the sad and joyous circumstances of my life. I hope you will be more happy than I have been." Madame de Pompadour, recalling her follies, serious matters they were to her, said to the Prince de Soubise, "It is like reading a strange book; my life is an improbable romance; I do not believe it." "Gray hairs had come on like daylight streaming in,--daylight and a headache with it. Pleasure had gone to bed with the rouge on her cheeks."