..."I am to send good store of news from the country for her highness entertainment.... Her highness loveth merry tales."
"The queen stood up and bade me reach forth my arm to rest her thereon. O! what sweet burden to my next song. Petrarch shall eke out good matter for this business."
"The queen loveth to see me in my new frize jerkin, and saith 'tis well enough cut. I will have another made liken to it. I do remember she spit on sir Matthew's fringed cloth, and said the fool's wit was gone to rags.—Heaven spare me from such jibing!"
"I must turn my poor wits towards my suit for the lands in the north.... I must go in an early hour, be fore her highness hath special matters brought up to counsel on.—I must go before the breakfast covers are placed, and stand uncovered as her highness cometh forth her chamber; then kneel and say, God save your majesty, I crave your ear at what hour may suit for your servant to meet your blessed countenance. Thus will I gain her favor to follow to the auditory.
"Trust not a friend to do or say,
In that yourself can sue or pray."
The lands alluded to in the last extract, formed a large estate in the north of England, which an ancestor of Harrington had forfeited by his adherence to the house of York during the civil wars, and which he was now endeavouring to recover. This further mention of the business occurs in one of his letters.
"Yet I will adventure to give her majesty five hundred pounds in money, and some pretty jewel or garment, as you shall advise, only praying her majesty to further my suit with some of her learned counsel; which I pray you to find some proper time to move in; this some hold as a dangerous adventure, but five and twenty manors do well justify my trying it."
How notorious must have been the avarice and venality of a sovereign, before such a mode of insuring success in a law-suit could have entered into the imagination of a courtier!
But the fortunes of Harrington, as of persons of more importance, now become involved in the state of Irish affairs, to which the attention of the reader must immediately be directed.