ward and willing men as ever I saw," there was not "a barrel of beer nor a loaf of bread" to give them. The one cry throughout the correspondence of this period is: "Nothing can exceed the patient and willing spirit of both sailors and soldiers; but, for God's sake, send us provisións, send us powder, send us money, clothes, and drink, else we be too enfeebled to fight." Still, the miserable parsimony of the queen was deaf to all entreaties, in spite of Drake's advice, that it was an ill policy "to hazard a kingdom with saving a little charge."

The result of all this cheese-paring was now to tell its tale. Off Norfolk a storm arose; the men under Howard in pursuit of the Armada were too weak to work the ships; the admiral himself was compelled to satisfy the pangs of hunger with a few coarse beans, while the crews were forced for drink-the story can hardly be credited-to fall back upon the resources of human nature, and the chase had to be abandoned. With extreme difficulty Howard, accompanied by the largest of his ships, reached Margate; the rest of the fleet were driven into Harwich. "Our parsimony at home," writes Captain Whyte to Walsingham, "hath bereaved us of the famousest victory that ever our nation had at sea."

XXXVI.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH.-FARRAR.

[The sovereign who succeeded Elizabeth had been king of Scotland for a quarter of a century, but he had had little real power, and had busied himself with devising a scheme of absolute government which was to be tried in his new kingdom of England. Lacking tact and skill, he soon came into collision with the English House of Commons, and sowed trouble for his son to reap. He reversed the foreign policy of his predecessor by at once making peace with Spain, and through all his life he assiduously courted the favor of that power. It was mainly to the Spanish policy of James that Raleigh was sacrificed. Raleigh had grown up among the great men who had been so conspicuous as navigators and discoverers in Elizabeth's reign.]

AMONG Souls so pure and noble the boy Raleigh passed his earlier years. After brilliant promise at school and college, by the age of seventeen he was fighting for Protestants in France, and beginning his many-sided career as soldier, sailor, courtier, poet, discoverer, and author. If you would understand his life, and the glorious years of Queen Elizabeth, you must remember three things—that it was the era of the Renascence, the era of the Reformation, and the era of the colonization of America.

It was the era of the Renascence. That new boyhood of life produced splendid daring. The glory of England, in that day, was as when the aloe rushes into its crimson flower. Around the queen stood men crowned with many laurels, men of strong passions, of deep feelings, of large hopes, of dauntless endurance, of ardent imagination, of magnificent purposes. Think of the day when Hooker was preaching at the Temple; and Bacon meditating on the "Novum Organum;' and Spenser writing the "Faerie Queene;" and Sidney fighting in the Netherlands; and Galileo reading the secrets of the stars; and Drake singeing the beard of the king of

Spain; and Shakspere, Marlowe, Chapman, and Ben Jonson were pouring forth all the passion of which man's heart is capable; and Milton was a little boy; when trade, art, science, learning, burst into new life; when England was acquiring the empire of the sea; and the queen was telling Mendoza-in quite her natural voice, and as though it was the most natural thing in the world, though he was the embassador of a king at whom the world trembled—that if he talked to her about Philip's threats again she would fling him into a dungeon. Yes! England was the England of Shakspere and Raleigh, and spoke in the voice of England then, because her sons were neither cynical unbelievers nor gilded effeminates, but feared God, and were noble and great and true.

And this era of the Renascence was, on the religious side, the era of the Reformation. In these our days love of popery shows itself in coquetting with dead usages, and hatred of popery has dwindled down into the feeble spite of religious newspapers; and most men, caring nothing about either tendency, walk in the cold mid region between a boundless skepticism and an unfathomable superstition. But in those days hatred of popery was no mere intolerance about minor religious opinions. It was, and had a right to be, a holy and mighty passion. It meant hatred of popes like Pius V., who sent his soldiers into France with the words, "Slay immediately whatever heretics fall into your hands," and who taught Englishmen to defy and plot against their queen. It meant hatred of Moloch fires which flamed through all lands; hatred of queens steeped, like Mary, in murder and adultery; hatred of generals, like Alva, reeking with the blood of saints; hatred of blood which cried to heaven from an earth which would not cover her slain. Hatred of popery meant, in that day, hatred of the sanguinary alliance between priestly usurpation and monarchic despotism; between cruel tyranny and deadly superstition. It meant hatred of burn

ings, tortures, butcheries; hatred of the dark, crooked devil's work of a plotting, murdering Jesuitism, which absolved the reckless perjuries of the conspirator, and consecrated the cursed dagger of the assassin; it meant hatred of the Inquisitor, wielding the sword of the tyrant and wearing the ephod of the priest. But with Raleigh-born when the fires of Smithfield were barely extinguished, reading Foxe's "Martyrs" at his mother's knee, who, as a boy, had fought against Alva in the Netherlands, and seen Condé die at Jarnac, whose ears had thrilled with the shrieks of St. Bartholomew, and who knew how Philip of Spain had laughed aloud when he heard of that awful massacre, and how Pope Gregory XIII. had struck medals and sung Te Deums in its honor-to Ra leigh hatred of popery was, in that day, inevitably one with loyalty to Elizabeth and love of England, and passion for the primary rights, the natural liberty and free conscience of mankind. And because he was a life-long foe to popery he was a life-long foe to Spain, which was then trying to blight the whole world with the upas shadows of abhorrent absolutism.

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The great men of Elizabeth knew that the triumph of Spain, the triumph of popery, would have meant the holiness of racks and the beatitude of thumbscrews. It would have meant that the England of Elizabeth would have reeked, as did the England of James II., with the odors of the charnel-house. It was this that made Raleigh fight papists in Ireland, which he called then, as it is now, not the common weal, but the common woe;" and fight papists in France, and in the Netherlands, and on the Armada, and in the New World. It was this which made him burn the Spanish fleet in Cadiz Bay. It was this that made him tell in immortal prose, as Tennyson has told in immortal verse, that death of Sir Richard Grenville, when one English ship fought for fifteen mortal hours against fifty-three Spanish ships at the Azores. Yes, in the era of the Reformation hatred of

popery meant love of truth, love of England, love of freedom, love of progress, air, and light.

But, nobly as Raleigh served the cause of England and the cause of the Reformation, it is with the New World and its colonization that his name will be most gloriously and most permanently connected. To Raleigh and the old sea worthies of England the New World meant Eldorado. But Spain, forsooth, claimed the whole of this New World by virtue of a trumpery parchment signed by a meddling Italian priest ! And how did this land of promise and golden dreams fare in the hands of popery and Spain? The tale of their greed and cruelty rang through all lands. The flames woven on the banners of Cortez were the accursed emblem of the Inquisition. But they had not occupied a third, even, of the coast; and was that land of boundless wonder and beauty, of boundless fertility and wealth, to be abandoned to them? Were millions of innocent Indians to be treated like brute beasts? Were the English, whom they called "Lutheran devils," to be handed over to the rack and the galleys, if they ventured to trade, nay, if they were but shipwrecked, on those shores? Not if Raleigh could help it! His genius fixed upon, and his dauntless patience and princely munificence secured regions which had almost escaped the notice of Spain. On the colonization of Virginia he spent £40,000, and was ready to spend his whole fortune, to the last coin.

Let me for one moment glance at his life and end. If you would judge of his zenith, see him in the splendor of Durham House, his beautiful wife beside him, his noble boy at his knee, sometimes flashing about as captain of Elizabeth's guard, in his armor of enameled silver; sometimes in his "doublet of white satin, all embroidered with rich pearls, and a weighty chain of great pearls around his neck; the friend of Sidney, the patron of Spenser, the companion of Ben Jonson and Shakspere, lord of the Stannaries, governor of Munster, governor of Jersey, rear-admiral of the