Note 207 — The Table.

Adultery. The word occurs in Bacon's Essays. In his Essay of Empire, the writer says:—"This kind of danger is then to be feared chiefly when the wives have plots for the raising of their own children, or else that they be advoutresses." Sir Simonds D'Ewes, in his account of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, in 1613, describes the Countess of Essex as "Somerset's advoutress" (Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, ed. Halliwell, I. 74).