sive writer giving in generally on merest hearsay to the general complaint against him, either from fear of running counter to big names, or from mere laziness, and yet absolving him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge enables him to judge. In the trust that I may be able to clear him from a few more charges, I write these pages, premising that I do not profess to have access to any new and recondite documents. I merely take the broad facts of the story from documents open to all, and comment on them as every man should wish his own life to be commented on.

But I do so on a method which I cannot give up; and that is the Bible method; I say boldly, that historians have hitherto failed in understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the persons and facts in his day, because they will not judge them by the canons which the Bible lays down-by which I mean not only the New Testament but the Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch Presbyterians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is 6 not contrary to the New.'

Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry, coming as it does from a countryman of John Knox. " Society, it would seem, was yet in a state in which such a man could seriously plead, that the madness he feigned was justified' (his last word is unfair, for Raleigh only hopes that it is no sin) by the example of David, King of Israel!' ing state of society when men actually Bibles, not too little, but too much! I think that if poor dear Raleigh had considered the example of David a little more closely, he need never have feigned madness at all; and that his error lay quite in an opposite direction from looking on the

What a shock. believed their For my part,

Bible heroes, David especially, as too sure models. At all events, let us try Raleigh by the very scriptural standard which he himself lays down, not merely in this case unwisely, but in his History of the World' more wisely than any historian whom we have ever read; and say, ' Judged as the Bible taught our Puritan forefathers to judge every man, the character is intelligible enough; tragic, but noble and triumphant judged as men have been judged in history for the last hundred years, by hardly any canon save those of the private judgment, which philosophic cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear of public opinion, may happen to have forged, the man is a phenomenon, only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than his biographers' notions about him.' Again I say, I have not solved the problem; but it will be enough if I make some think it both soluble, and worth solving.

Let us look round, then, and see into what sort of a country, into what sort of a world, the young adventurer is going forth, at seventeen years of age, to seek

his fortune.

Born in 1552, his young life has sprung up and grown with the young life of England. The earliest fact, perhaps, which he can recollect, is the flash of joy on every face which proclaims that Mary Tudor is dead, and Elizabeth reigns at last. As he grows, the young man sees all the hope and adoration of the English people centre in that wondrous maid, and his own centre in her likewise. He had been base had he been otherwise. She comes to the throne with such a prestige as never sovereign came since the days when Isaiah sang his pæan over young Hezekiah's accession. Young, learned, witty, beautiful (as with such a father and mother she could not help being), with an expres

sion of countenance remarkable (I speak of those early days) rather for its tenderness and intellectual depth than its strength, she comes forward as the Champion of the Reformed Faith, the interpretress of the will and conscience of the people of Englandherself persecuted all but to the death, and purified by affliction, like gold tried in the fire. She gathers round her, one by one, young men of promise, and trains them herself to their work. And they fulfil it, and serve her, and grow grey-headed in her service, working as faithfully, as righteously, as patriotically, as men ever worked on earth. They are her favourites ;' because they are men who deserve favour; men who count not their own lives dear to themselves for the sake of the queen and of that commonweal which their hearts and reasons tell them is one with her. They are still men, though; and some of them have their grudgings and envyings against each other: she keeps the balance even between them as skilfully, gently, justly, as woman ever did, or mortal man either. Some have their conceited hopes of marrying her, becoming her masters. She rebukes and pardons. 'Out of the dust I took you, sir! go and do your duty, humbly and rationally, henceforth, or into the dust I trample you again!' And they reconsider themselves, and obey. But many, or most of them, are new men, country gentlemen, and younger sons. She will follow her father's plan, of keeping down the overgrown feudal princes, who, though brought low by the wars of the Roses, are still strong enough to throw everything into confusion by resisting at once the Crown and Commons. Proud nobles reply by rebellion, come down southwards with ignorant Popish henchmen at their backs; will restore Popery, marry the Queen of Scots, make the middle class and the majority submit to the feudal

lords and the minority. The Alruna-maiden, with her aristocracy of genius,' is too strong for them; the people's heart is with her, and not with dukes. Each mine only blows up its diggers, and, there are many dry eyes at their ruin. Her people ask her to marry.

She answers gently, proudly, eloquently: 'She is married-the people of England is her husband. She has vowed it.' And well she keeps her vow. And yet there is a tone of sadness in that great speech. Her woman's heart yearns after love, after children; after a strong bosom on which to repose that weary head. But she knows that it must not be. She has her reward. 'Whosoever gives up husband or child for my sake and the gospel's, shall receive them back a hundredfold in this present life,' as Elizabeth does. Her reward is an adoration from high and low, which is to us now inexplicable, impossible, overstrained,

which was not so then.

For the whole nation is in a mood of exaltation; England is fairyland; the times are the last days— strange, terrible, and glorious. At home are Jesuits plotting; dark, crooked-pathed, going up and down in all manner of disguises, doing the devil's work if men ever did it; trying to sow discord between man and man, class and class; putting out books full of filthy calumnies, declaring the queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a usurper; English law null and all state appointments void, by virtue of a certain 'Bull;' and calling on the subjects to rebellion and assassination, even on the bedchamber women to do to her as Judith did to Holofernes.' She answers by calm contempt. Now and then Burleigh and Walsingham catch some of the rogues, and they meet their deserts; but she for the most part lets them have their way. God is on her side, and she will not fear what man can do to her.

Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic splendour. Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny, with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream; who go forth slaying and to slay, in the name of their gods, like those old Assyrian conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with tutelary genii flying above their heads, mingled with the eagles who trail the entrails of the slain. By conquest, intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the southern nations her vassals or her tools; close to our own shores, the Netherlands are struggling vainly for their liberties; abroad, the Western Islands, and the whole trade of Africa and India, will in a few years be hers. And already the Pope, whose 'most Catholic' and faithful servant she is, has repaid her services in the cause of darkness by the gift of the whole New World—a gift which she has claimed by cruelties and massacres unexampled since the days of Timour and Zinghis Khan. There she spreads and spreads, as Drake found her picture in the Government House at St. Domingo, the horse leaping through the globe, and underneath, 'Non sufficit orbis.' Who shall withstand her, armed as she is with the three-edged sword of Antichrist-superstition, strength, and gold?

English merchantmen, longing for some share in the riches of the New World, go out to trade in Guinea, in the Azores, in New Spain; and are answered by shot and steel. 'Both policy and religion,' as Fray Simon says, fifty years afterwards, 'forbid Christians to trade with heretics!' Lutheran devils, and enemies of God,' are the answer they get in words; in deeds, whenever they have a superior force they may be allowed to land, and to water their ships, even to trade, under exorbitant restrictions; but generally this is merely a trap