become the fashion now to deny even that.  The plain facts seem that she was very graceful, active, accomplished in all outward manners, of a perfect figure, and of that style of intellectual beauty, depending on expression, which attracted (and we trust always will attract) Britons far more than that merely sensuous loveliness in which no doubt Mary Stuart far surpassed her.  And there seems little doubt that, like many Englishwomen, she retained her beauty to a very late period in life, not to mention that she was, in 1592, just at that age of rejuvenescence which makes many a woman more lovely at sixty than she has been since she was thirty-five.  No doubt, too, she used every artificial means to preserve her famous complexion; and quite right she was.  This beauty of hers had been a talent, as all beauty is, committed to her by God; it had been an important element in her great success; men had accepted it as what beauty of form and expression generally is, an outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace; and while the inward was unchanged, what wonder if she tried to preserve the outward?  If she was the same, why should she not try to look the same?  And what blame to those who worshipped her, if, knowing that she was the same, they too should fancy that she looked the same, the Elizabeth of their youth, and should talk as if the fair flesh, as well as the fair spirit, was immortal?  Does not every loving husband do so when he forgets the gray hair and the sunken cheek, and all the wastes of time, and sees the partner of many joys and sorrows not as she has become, but as she was, ay, and is to him, and will be to him, he trusts, through all eternity?  There is no feeling in these Elizabethan worshippers which we have not seen, potential and crude, again and again in the best and noblest of young men whom we have met, till it was crushed in them by the luxury, effeminacy, and unbelief in chivalry, which are the sure accompaniment of a long peace, which war may burn up with beneficent fire.

But we must hasten on now; for Raleigh is out of prison in September, and by the next spring in parliament speaking wisely and well, especially on his fixed idea, war with Spain, which he is rewarded for forthwith in Father Parson’s ‘Andreæ Philopatris Responsio’ by a charge of founding a school of Atheism for the corruption of young gentlemen; a charge which Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Protestant as he is, will find it useful one day to recollect.

Elizabeth, however, now that Raleigh has married the fair Throgmorton and done wisely in other matters, restores him to favour.  If he has sinned, he has suffered: but he is as useful as ever, now that his senses have returned to him; and he is making good speeches in parliament, instead of bad ones to weak maidens; so we find him once more in favour, and possessor of Sherborne Manor, where he builds and beautifies, with ‘groves and gardens of much variety and great delight.’  And God, too, seems to have forgiven him; perhaps has forgiven; for there the fair Throgmorton brings him a noble boy.  Ut sis vitalis metuo puer!

Raleigh will quote David’s example one day, not wisely or well.  Does David’s example ever cross him now, and those sad words,—‘The Lord hath put away thy sin, . . . nevertheless the child that is born unto thee shall die?’

Let that be as it may, all is sunshine once more.  Sherborne Manor, a rich share in the great carack, a beautiful wife, a child; what more does this man want to make him happy?  Why should he not settle down upon his lees, like ninety-nine out of the hundred, or at least try a peaceful and easy path toward more ‘praise and pudding?’  The world answers, or his biographers answer for him, that he needs to reinstate himself in his mistress’s affection; which is true or not, according as we take it.  If they mean thereby, as most seem to mean, that it was a mere selfish and ambitious scheme by which to wriggle into court favour once more—why, let them mean it: I shall only observe that the method which Raleigh took was a rather more dangerous and self-sacrificing one than courtiers are wont to take.  But if it be meant that Walter Raleigh spoke somewhat thus with himself,—‘I have done a base and dirty deed, and have been punished for it.  I have hurt the good name of a sweet woman who loves me, and whom I find to be a treasure; and God, instead of punishing me by taking her from me, has rendered me good for evil by giving her to me.  I have justly offended a mistress whom I worship, and who, after having shown her just indignation, has returned me good for evil by giving me these fair lands of Sherborne, and only forbid me her presence till the scandal has passed away.  She sees and rewards my good in spite of my evil; and I, too, know that I am better than I have seemed; that I am fit for nobler deeds than seducing maids of honour.  How can I prove that?  How can I redeem my lost name for patriotism and public daring?  How can I win glory for my wife, seek that men shall forget her past shame in the thought, “She is Walter Raleigh’s wife?”  How can I show my mistress that I loved her all along, that I acknowledge her bounty, her mingled justice and mercy?  How can I render to God for all the benefits which He has done unto me?  How can I do a deed the like of which was never done in England?’

If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh’s mind, what could we say of it, but that it was the natural and rational feeling of an honourable and right-hearted man, burning to rise to the level which he knew ought to be his, because he knew that he had fallen below it?  And what right better way of testifying these feelings than to do what, as we shall see, Raleigh did?  What right have we to impute to him lower motives than these, while we confess that these righteous and noble motives would have been natural and rational;—indeed, just what we flatter ourselves that we should have felt in his place?  Of course, in his grand scheme, the thought came in, ‘And I shall win to myself honour, and glory, and wealth,’—of course.  And pray, sir, does it not come in in your grand schemes; and yours; and yours?  If you made a fortune to-morrow by some wisely and benevolently managed factory, would you forbid all speech of the said wisdom and benevolence, because you had intended that wisdom and benevolence should pay you a good percentage?  Away with cant, and let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.

So Raleigh hits upon a noble project; a desperate one, true: but he will do it or die.  He will leave pleasant Sherborne, and the bosom of the beautiful bride, and the first-born son, and all which to most makes life worth having, and which Raleigh enjoys more intensely than most men; for he is a poet, and a man of strong nervous passions withal.  But,—

‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.’

And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, danger of death in battle, danger of the Inquisition, rack, and stake, in search of El Dorado.  What so strange in that?  I have known half a dozen men who, in his case, and conscious of his powers, would have done the same from the same noble motive.

He begins prudently; and sends a Devonshire man, Captain Whiddon—probably one of The Whiddons of beautiful Chagford—to spy out the Orinoco.  He finds that the Spaniards are there already; that Berreo, who has attempted El Dorado from the westward, starting from New Granada and going down the rivers, is trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth; that he is hanging the poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to hunt them and sell them for slaves, imprisoning the caciques to extort their gold, torturing, ravishing, kidnapping, and conducting himself as was usual among Spaniards of those days.

Raleigh’s spirit is stirred within him.  If ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ fiction as it is, once excited us, how must a far worse reality have excited