rogue.  If we had received such a letter from a friend, we should have said at once, ‘Why the man, in his hurry and confusion, has omitted the word; he must have meant to write, not “There is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened to,” but “There is none on the face of the earth that I would rather be fastened to,”‘ which would at once make sense and suit fact.  For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton forthwith, but made her the best of husbands.  My conjectural emendation may go for what it is worth: but that the passage, as it stands in Murdin’s State Papers (the MSS. I have not seen) is either misquoted, or mis-written by Raleigh himself, I cannot doubt.  He was not one to think nonsense, even if he scribbled it.

The Spanish raid turns out well.  Raleigh overlooks Elizabeth’s letters of recall till he finds out that the King of Spain has stopped the Plate-fleet for fear of his coming; and then returns, sending on Sir John Burrough to the Azores, where he takes the ‘Great Carack,’ the largest prize (1600 tons) which had ever been brought into England.  The details of that gallant fight stand in the pages of Hakluyt.  It raised Raleigh once more to wealth, though not to favour.  Shortly after he returns from the sea, he finds himself, where he deserves to be, in the Tower, where he does more than one thing which brought him no credit.  How far we are justified in calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew, his keeper, for not letting him ‘disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease his mind but with a sight of the Queen, or his heart would break,’ hypocrisy, is a very different matter.  Honest Arthur Gorges, a staunch friend of Raleigh’s, tells the story laughingly and lovingly, as if he thought Raleigh sincere, but somewhat mad: and yet honest Gorges has a good right to say a bitter thing; for after having been ‘ready to break with laughing at seeing them two brawl and scramble like madmen, and Sir George’s new periwig torn off his crown,’ he sees ‘the iron walking’ and daggers out, and playing the part of him who taketh a dog by the ears, ‘purchased such a rap on the knuckles, that I wished both their pates broken, and so with much ado they staid their brawl to see my bloody fingers,’ and then set to work to abuse the hapless peacemaker.  After which things Raleigh writes a letter to Cecil, which is still more offensive in the eyes of virtuous biographers—how ‘his heart was never broken till this day, when he hears the Queen goes so far off, whom he followed with love and desire on so many journeys, and am now left behind in a dark prison all alone.’ . . . ‘I that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks,’ and so forth, in a style in which the vulturine nose must needs scent carrion, just because the roses are more fragrant than they should be in a world where all ought to be either vultures or carrion for their dinners.  As for his despair, had he not good reason to be in despair?  By his own sin he has hurled himself down the hill which he has so painfully climbed.  He is in the Tower—surely no pleasant or hopeful place for any man.  Elizabeth is exceedingly wroth with him; and what is worse, he deserves what he has got.  His whole fortune is ventured in an expedition over which he has no control, which has been unsuccessful in its first object, and which may be altogether unsuccessful in that which it has undertaken as a pis-aller, and so leave him penniless.  There want not, too, those who will trample on the fallen.  The deputy has been cruelly distraining on his Irish tenants for a ‘supposed debt of his to the Queen of £400 for rent,’ which was indeed but fifty marks, and which was paid, and has carried off 500 milch kine from the poor settlers whom he has planted there, and forcibly thrust him out of possession of a castle.  Moreover, the whole Irish estates are likely to come to ruin; for nothing prevails but rascality among the English soldiers, impotence among the governors, and rebellion among the natives.  Three thousand Burkes are up in arms; his ‘prophecy of this rebellion’ ten days ago was laughed at, and now has come true; and altogether, Walter Raleigh and all belonging to him is in as evil case as he ever was on earth.  No wonder, poor fellow, if he behowls himself lustily, and not always wisely, to Cecil, and every one else who will listen to him.

As for his fine speeches about Elizabeth, why forget the standing-point from which such speeches were made?  Over and above his present ruin, it was (and ought to have been) an utterly horrible and unbearable thing to Raleigh, or any man, to have fallen into disgrace with Elizabeth by his own fault.  He feels (and perhaps rightly) that he is as it were excommunicated from England, and the mission and the glory of England.  Instead of being, as he was till now, one of a body of brave men working together in one great common cause, he has cut himself off from the congregation by his own selfish lust, and there he is left alone with his shame.  We must try to realise to ourselves the way in which such men as Raleigh looked not only at Elizabeth, but at all the world.  There was, in plain palpable fact, something about the Queen, her history, her policy, the times, the glorious part which England, and she as the incarnation of the then English spirit, were playing upon earth, which raised imaginative and heroical souls into a permanent exaltation—a ‘fairyland,’ as they called it themselves, which seems to us fantastic, and would be fantastic in us, because we are not at their work, or in their days.  There can be no doubt that a number of as noble men as ever stood together on the earth did worship that woman, fight for her, toil for her, risk all for her, with a pure chivalrous affection which has furnished one of the most beautiful pages in all the book of history.  Blots there must needs have been, and inconsistencies, selfishnesses, follies; for they too were men of like passions with ourselves; but let us look at the fair vision as a whole, and thank God that such a thing has for once existed even imperfectly on this sinful earth, instead of playing the part of Ham and falling under his curse,—the penalty of slavishness, cowardice, loss of noble daring, which surely falls on any generation which is ‘banausos,’ to use Aristotle’s word; which rejoices in its forefathers’ shame, and, unable to believe in the nobleness of others, is unable to become noble itself.

As for the ‘Alexander and Diana’ affectations, they were the language of the time: and certainly this generation has no reason to find fault with them, or with a good deal more of the ‘affectations’ and ‘flattery’ of Elizabethan times, while it listens complacently night after night ‘to honourable members’ complimenting not Queen Elizabeth, but Sir Jabesh Windbag, Fiddle, Faddle, Red-tape, and party with protestations of deepest respect and fullest confidence in the very speeches in which they bring accusations of every offence short of high treason—to be understood, of course, in a ‘parliamentary sense,’ as Mr. Pickwick’s were in a ‘Pickwickian’ one.  If a generation of Knoxes and Mortons, Burleighs and Raleighs, shall ever arise again, one wonders by what name they will call the parliamentary morality and parliamentary courtesy of a generation which has meted out such measure to their ancestors’ failings?

‘But Queen Elizabeth was an old woman then.’  I thank the objector even for that ‘then’; for it is much nowadays to find any one who believes that Queen Elizabeth was ever young, or who does not talk of her as if she was born about seventy years of age covered with rouge and wrinkles.  I will undertake to say that as to the beauty of this woman there is a greater mass of testimony, and from the very best judges too, than there is of the beauty of any personage in history; and yet it has