“I was like Robin Goodfellow: when the maids spilt the milk-pans, or kept any racket, they would lay it upon Robin.”

A wry account of being blamed at court for mischief started by others; the gloss is as Bacon reports it · Remark of himself, recorded by Francis Bacon

• Court
• Humour
• Reputation

“With humble sails, after I had once ventured upon this spreading ocean of images, my apprehensive youth, for lack of a well touched compass, did easily wander beyond proportion.”

On how his early tragedies outgrew their design once imagination took hold · Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney

• Imagination
• Writing
• Youth

“These exercises of my youth I dedicate to that worthy Sir Philip Sidney, so long since departed.”

His prose life of Sidney began as an offering of early poems to a dead friend · Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney

• Friendship
• Memory
• Poetry

“Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, councillor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney.”

He chose service and friendship, not authorship, as the titles he wished remembered · Epitaph he composed for his own tomb at Warwick

• Friendship
• Identity
• Service

“For my own part I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit.”

He sets experience and character above verbal brilliance as the aim of his writing · Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (Life of Sidney)

• Life
• Wit
• Writing

“I know the world and believe in God.”

A compressed creed of living in a fallen world without withdrawing from it · Letter to Sir John Coke, 1 February 1613

• Conviction
• Faith
• World