Amenities of Literature Part 52

The first edition of the "Poly-olbion," in 1613, consisted of eighteen "Songs," or cantos, and every one enriched by the notes and ill.u.s.trations of the poet's friend, our great national antiquary, SELDEN, whose avarice of words in these recondite stores conceals almost as many facts as he affords phrases. This volume was ill received by the incurious readers of that age. Drayton had vainly imagined that the n.o.bles and gentlemen of England would have felt a filial interest in the tale of their fathers, commemorated in these poetic annals, and an honourable pride in their domains here so graphically pictured. But no voice, save those of a few melodious brothers, cheered the lonely lyrist, who had sung on every mountain, and whose verse had flowed with every river. After a hopeless suspension of nine years, the querulous author sent forth the concluding volume to join its neglected brother.

It appeared with a second edition of the first part, which is nothing more than the unsold copies of the first, to which the twelve additional "Songs" are attached, separately paged. These last come no longer enriched by the notes of Selden, or even embellished by those fanciful maps which the unfortunate poet now found too costly an ornament.

Certain accidental marks of the printer betray the bibliographical secret, that the second edition was in reality but the first.[2] The preface to the second part is remarkable for its inscription, in no good humour,

TO ANY THAT WILL READ IT!

There was yet no literary public to appeal to, to save the neglected work which the great SELDEN had deemed worthy of his studies: but there was, as the poet indignantly designates them, "a cattle, _odi profanum vulgus et arceo_, of which I account them, be they never so great." And "the cattle" conceived that there was nothing in this island worthy studying. We had not yet learned to esteem ourselves at a time when six editions of Camden's "Britannia," in the original Latin, were diffusing the greatness of England throughout Europe.

But though this poet devoted much of his life to this great antiquarian and topographic poem, he has essayed his powers in almost every species of poetry; fertility of subject, and fluency of execution, are his characteristics. He has written historical narratives too historical; heroic epistles hardly Ovidian; elegies on several occasions, or rather, domestic epistles, of a Horatian cast; pastorals, in which there is a freshness of imagery, breathing with the life of nature; and songs, and satire, and comedy. In comedy he had not been unsuccessful, but in satire he was considered more indignant than caustic. There is one species of poetry, rare among us, in which he has been eminently successful; his "Nymphidia, or Court of Faerie," is a model of the grotesque, those arabesques of poetry, those lusory effusions on chimerical objects. There are grave critics who would deny the poet the liberty allowed to the painter. The "Nymphidia" seems to have been ill understood by some modern critics. The poet has been censured for "neither imparting nor feeling that half-believing seriousness which enchants us in the wild and magical touches of Shakespeare;" but the poet designed an exquisitely ludicrous fiction. Drayton has, however, relieved the grotesque scenes, by rising into the higher strains of poetry, such as Gray might not have disdained.

It was the misfortune of Drayton not to have been a popular poet, which we may infer from his altercations with his booksellers, and from their frequent practice of prefixing new t.i.tle pages, with fresher dates, to the first editions of his poems. That he was also in perpetual quarrel with his muse, appears by his frequent alteration of his poems. He often felt that curse of an infelicitous poet, that his diligence was more active than his creative power. Drayton was a poet of volume, but his genius was peculiar; from an unhappy facility in composition, in reaching excellence he too often declined into mediocrity. A modern reader may be struck by the purity and strength of his diction; his strong descriptive manner lays hold of the fancy; but he is always a poet of reason, and never of pa.s.sion. He cannot be considered as a poet of mediocrity, who has written so much above that level; nor a poet who can rank among the highest cla.s.s, who has often flattened his spirit by its redundance.

There was another cause, besides his quarrel with his muse, which threw a shade over the life of Drayton. He had been forward to greet James the First, on his accession to the throne of England, with a congratulatory ode; but for some cause, which has not been revealed, he tells us, "he suffered s.h.i.+pwreck by his forward pen." The king appears to have conceived a personal dislike to the bard, a circ.u.mstance not usual with James towards either poets or flatterers. It seems to arise from some state-matter, for Drayton tells us,

I feare, as I do stabbing, this word, state.

According to Oldys, Drayton appears to have been an agent in the Scottish king's intercourse with his English friends; some unlucky incident probably occurred, which might have indisposed the monarch towards his humble friend. The unhappy result of his court to the new sovereign cast a sour and melancholy humour over his whole life; Drayton, in his "Elegy" to his brother-poet, Sandys, has perpetuated his story.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dr. Johnson has ascribed the invention of local poetry to Denham, who, he thought, had "traced a new scheme of poetry, copied by Garth and Pope, after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration of smaller poets." Johnson and the critics of his day were wholly unacquainted with the Fathers of our poetry; nor is it true that we have not had loco-descriptive poems since Garth and Pope, which may rank with theirs.

[2] Perhaps none of our poets have been more luckless in their editors than Drayton. He himself published a folio edition of his works in 1619; but some of his more interesting productions, now lying before me, are contained in a small volume, 1631--the year in which he died.

A modern folio edition was published by Dodsley in 1748. The t.i.tle-page a.s.sures us that this volume contains _all_ his writings; while a later edition, in four volumes 8vo, 1753, pretends to supply the deficiencies of the former, which at length Dodsley had discovered, but it is awkwardly done by an _Appendix_, and is still deficient. The rapid demand for a new edition of Drayton between 1748 and 1753 bears a suspicious aspect. An intelligent bibliopolist, Mr.

Rodd, informs me that this _octavo_ edition is in fact the identical _folio_, only arranged to the octavo form by a contrivance, well known among printers, at the time of printing the folio. The separation of the additional poems in the Appendix confirms this suggestion.

Of the "Poly-olbion," the edition called the second, of 1622, has fetched an excessive price; while the first, considered incomplete, may be procured at a very moderate price. The possessor of the first edition, however, enjoys the whole treasure of Selden's lore. Mr.

Southey, in his "Specimens of Our Ancient Poets," has reprinted the entire "Poly-olbion" with his usual judgment; but, unhappily, the rich stores of Selden the publishers probably deemed superfluous.

Drayton is worthy of a complete edition of his works.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF RAWLEIGH.

Rawleigh is a great name in our history, and fills a s.p.a.ce in our imagination. His military and maritime genius looked for new regions, to found perhaps his own dominion. Yet was this hero the courtier holding "the gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on," and the profound statesman--whose maxims and whose counsels Milton, the severe Milton, carefully collected--and the poet, who, when he found a master-genius lingering in a desert, joyed to pay him the homage of his protection. Rawleigh, who, in his youthful hours, and even through his vagrant voyages, was at all times a student, in the ripeness of his knowledge was a sage. Thus he who seemed through all his restless days to have lived only for his own age, was the true servant of posterity.

If ever there have been men whose temperaments and dispositions have harmonized within themselves faculties seemingly incompatible, with an equability of force combining the extremes of our nature, it would not be difficult to believe that Sir Walter Rawleigh was one of this rarest species. Various and opposite were his enterprises, but whichever was the object his apt.i.tude was prompt; for he is equally renowned for his active and his contemplative powers; in neither he seems to have held a secondary rank. And he has left the nation a collection of his writings which claim for their author the just honours of being one of the founders of our literature.

This is the perspective view of his _character_ as it appears at a distance; his was a strange and adventurous _life_! the s.h.i.+fting scenes seem gathering together as in a tale of fiction, full of as surprising incidents, and as high pa.s.sions, and as intricate and mysterious as the involutions of a well-invented fable. And in this various history of a single individual should we be dazzled by the haughtiness of prosperity, and even be startled by the baseness of humiliation, still shall we find one sublime episode more glorious than the tale, and as pathetic a close as ever formed the catastrophe of a tragic romance. I pursue this history as far as concerns its psychological development.

It was the destiny of Rawleigh to be the artificer of his own fortunes, and in that arduous course to pa.s.s through pinching ways and sharp turns. The younger son of a family whose patrimony had not lasted with their antiquity, he had nothing left but his enterprise and his sword; his mind had decided on his calling. The romantic adventures of the Spanish in new regions had early kindled the master-mind which takes its lasting bent from its first strong impulse. The Spaniards and their new world, "the treasures and the paradises" which they enjoyed, haunted his dreams to his latest days. The age in which the great struggle had commenced in Europe for the independence of nations and of faiths, was as favourable to the indulgence of the military pa.s.sion as it was pregnant with political instruction. No period in modern history was so prodigal of statesmen and of heroes; and Rawleigh was to be both.

Two n.o.ble schools for military education were opened for our youthful volunteer: among the Protestants in France, when they a.s.sembled their own armies, and subsequently in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange, Rawleigh learned the discipline of a valorous but a wary leader, and beheld in Don John of Austria the hardihood of a presumptuous commander, whose "self-confidence could overcome the greatest difficulties, yet in his judgment so weak, that he could not manage the least."

The captain who had fleshed his sword in many a field, now cast his fortunes in that other element which led Columbus to discovery, and Pizarro to conquest. Rawleigh had an uterine brother, whom he justly called his "true brother," Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a great navigator, and the projector of a new pa.s.sage to the Indies; an expedition was fitted out by them to colonise some parts of North America; his first maritime essay was frustrated by a disastrous accident. But the intrepid activity of Rawleigh allowed no pause, and now it turned against the rebellious kerns of Ireland. His disputes with Grey, the Lord-deputy, brought them before the council-board in the presence of the queen. Our adventurer knew how to value this fortunate opportunity. His eloquent tale struck his lordly adversary dumb, and was not slightly noticed by Elizabeth.

The soldier of fortune was now hanging loosely about the circle of the court, watchful of another fortunate moment to attract the queen's attention. There was a very remarkable disposition in this extraordinary man, as I have elsewhere noticed, of practising petty artifices in the affairs of life. The gay cavalier flung his rich embroidered mantle across the plashy spot for an instantaneous foot-cloth, not unknowing that an act of gallantry was sure to win the susceptible coquetry of his royal mistress. His personal grace, and his tall stature, and the charm of his voluble elocution when once admitted into the presence, were irresistible. On the same system as he had cast his mantle before the queen, he scratched on a window-pane likely to catch her majesty's eye that verse expressive of his "desire" and "his fear to climb," to which the queen condescended to add her rhyme.

The man of genius was not yet entangled in the meshes of political parties, and was still contemplating on an imaginary land north of the Gulf of Florida, as studious of the art of navigation as he had been of the art of war. He has left a number of essays on both these subjects, composed for Prince Henry in the succeeding reign. He was already in favour with the queen, for she sanctioned a renewal of the unfortunate expedition under his brother. Rawleigh had the largest vessel built under his own eye, for he was skilful in naval architecture, and he named it "The Rawleigh," antic.i.p.ating the day when it should leave that name to a city or a kingdom. It was on this occasion that the queen commanded Rawleigh to present to his brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a precious gem on which was engraven an anchor guided by a lady, graciously desiring in return the picture of the hardy adventurer. Such were the arts of female coquetry which entered so admirably into her system of policy, kindling such personal enthusiasm in the professed lovers of their royal mistress, while she resigned her heroes to their enterprises at their own honourable cost of their fortunes or their lives. In this second expedition Sir Humphrey Gilbert realised a discovery of what was then called "The Newfoundland," of which he took possession for England with the due formalities; but on his return his slender bark foundered, and thus obscurely perished one of the most enlightened of that heroic race of our maritime discoverers--the true fathers of future colonies.

Rawleigh, unrolling an old map which had been presented to her royal father, charmed the queen by the visions which had long charmed himself.

Her majesty granted letters patent to secure to him the property of the countries which he might discover or might conquer. Rawleigh minutely planned the future operations, and by the captains he sent, for the queen would not part with her favourite, that country was discovered to which had the royal maiden not so eagerly given the name of "Virginia,"

had probably borne that of Rawleigh; for subsequently he betrayed this latent design when he proposed founding a city with that romantic name.

But the pressing interests of our home affairs withdrew his mind from undiscovered dominions. Rawleigh was a chief adviser of Elizabeth in the great Spanish invasion. He was eminently active in various expeditions, and not less serviceable in parliament. The ceaseless topic of his counsels, and the frequent exercise of his pen, was the alarming aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of the Spanish power. At this day, perhaps, we can form no adequate notion of that Catholic and colossal dominion which Rawleigh dwells on. "No prince in the west hath spread his wing far over his nest but the Spaniard, and made many attempts to make themselves masters of all Europe." Possibly he may have ascribed too great an influence to the treasures of India, which seem to have been always exaggerated; however, he a.s.sures us, and as a statesman he may have felt a conviction, that "its Indian gold endangers and disturbs all the nations of Europe; it creeps into counsels, purchases intelligence, and sets bound loyalty at liberty in the greatest monarchies. When they dare not with their own forces invade, they basely entertain the traitors and vagabonds of all nations." We have here a complete picture of those arts of policy which, in the revolutionary system of France, endangered Europe, and which may yet, should ever a colossal power again overshadow its independent empires.

To clip "the wing that had spread far over its nest," by cutting off the uninterrupted supplies of the plate fleets of Spain, was a course in which the queen only perceived the earnest loyalty of the intrepid adventurer; nor was that loyalty less for its perfect accordance with his own personal concerns.

Rawleigh and his joint adventurers in these discoveries were carrying on their expeditions at the risk of their private fortunes, and it appears that his own zeal had beguiled young men to change their immoveable lands for light pinnaces. The prudential ministers looked on with a cold eye, and the economical sovereign, as she was wont, rewarded her hero in her own way. Elizabeth bestowed t.i.tular honours, and cut out a seignory in Ireland from the Earl of Desmond's domains, which Rawleigh's own sword had chiefly won; twelve thousand acres, yielding no rents; dismantled farms and tenantless hamlets--an estate of fire and blood! A more substantial patent was conferred on him, to license taverns for the sale of wines; and at length it was enlarged to levy tonnage and poundage, specifying that the grant was "to sustain his great charges in the discovery of remote countries."

This was one of those odious monopolies by which the parsimonious sovereign pretended to reward the services of the individual by the infliction of a great public grievance, infinitely more intolerable than any pension-list; for every monopoly was a traffic admitting all sorts of abuses. Rawleigh's inventive faculty often broke forth into humbler schemes in domestic affairs. He seems first to have perceived in the expansion of society, the difficulty of communication for the wants of life. He projected an office for universal agency; and in this he antic.i.p.ated that useful intelligence which we now recognise by the term of advertis.e.m.e.nt. New enterprises and ceaseless occupation were the aliment of that restless and n.o.ble spirit. But these monopolies, severely exacted, provoking complaints and contests, were one among other causes which may account for Rawleigh's unpopularity, even at his meridian.

To his absorbing devotion to obtain the queen's favour, he has himself ascribed his numerous enemies. While Elizabeth listened to his ingenious solutions of all her inquiries, many close at hand took umbrage lest they themselves were being supplanted; while he himself, with marked expressions, disdained all popularity. Hence, from opposite quarters, we learn how haughtily his genius bore him in commanding the world under him. And there is no doubt, as Aubrey tells us, that he was "d.a.m.nably proud." Even in the height of court favour, this great man was obnoxious to the people. This we see by an anecdote of Tarleton, the jester of Elizabeth, famed for his extemporal acting. Performing before the queen, while Rawleigh stood by her majesty, shuffling a pack of cards, and pointing to the royal box, the jesting comedian exclaimed, "See, the knave commands the queen!" Her majesty frowned; but the audience applauding, the queen, ever chary in checking any popular feeling, reserved her anger till the following day, when Tarleton was banished from the royal presence. Nor was Rawleigh less unpopular in the succeeding reign, when the mob hooted this great man, and when this great man condescended to tell them how much he despised such rogues and varlets! The inconsiderate mult.i.tude, in the n.o.ble preface to his great work, he compared to "dogs, who always bark at those they know not, and whose nature is to accompany one another in these clamours."

However busied by the discovery of remote countries, the armed s.h.i.+ps of Rawleigh often brought into port a Spanish prize. The day arrived--the short but golden day--when, as his contemporary and a secretary of state has told us, "he who was first to roll through want, and disability to exist, before he came to a repose," betrayed a sudden affluence--in the magnificence about him--in the train of his followers, when he seemed to be the rival of the chivalrous Ess.e.x--in the gorgeousness of his dress, from the huge diamond which b.u.t.toned his feather, to his shoes powdered with pearls, darting from every point of his person the changeful light of countless jewels. In this habiliment, fitted to be the herald of that G.o.ddess of beauty to which Elizabeth was familiarly compared, beside the Queen during her royal progresses, stood the captain of her guard, and her eyes were often solaced as they dwelt on the minion of fortune, her own prosperous adventurer; it was with secret satisfaction that she knew his treasure was not taken out of her exchequer. It could only have been some great Spanish galleon, like that of "The Madre de Dios," which furnished Rawleigh with that complete suit of armour of solid silver which fixed all eyes at the tilt; or which went to build the stately mansion of Sherborne, and to plan its fanciful gardens and groves, drawing the river through the rocks. Curious in horticulture as in the slightest arts he practised, Rawleigh's hands transplanted the first orange trees which breathed in this colder clime, as he had given Ireland the Virginian potato, and England the Virginian tobacco, and perhaps the delicious ananas. But Sherborne was Church land. It is said that Sir Walter had often cast a wistful eye on it as it lay in his journeys from Devons.h.i.+re. It gave umbrage to some in Church and State that, by frightening a timid Bishop of Salisbury, he had prevailed on him to alienate the manor of Sherborne from his see in favour of the Crown, that it might the more securely be transferred to him who had coveted it, till another coveter, in the despicable Carr, plundered him who had despoiled the diocese.

A genius versatile as ambitious, moving in the eventful court of a female sovereign, though often musing on "remote countries" or Spanish galleons, could not stand as a mere spectator amid the agitated amphitheatre of politics, nor in the luxuriance of courtly idleness save himself from softer, but not always less fatal, intrigues. Rawleigh was the victim of love and of politics.

On his first entrance to a court life, Rawleigh found Burleigh and Leicester watchful of each other. They were the heads of dark factions which clouded the Court of Elizabeth, and crooked were the ways our aspirant had to wind. Leicester seems to have been an early patron of Rawleigh, by means of his nephew Sir Philip Sidney. At length, perceiving his ascendancy over the Queen, the great lord, to overturn this idol of womanish caprice, introduced his youthful son-in-law, the famous and unfortunate Ess.e.x; nor had he, who himself had been a reigning favourite, miscalculated on the fascination of a new lover. The contest for the royal smile became too apparent; ruptures and reconciliations followed, till death closed these eventful jealousies.

Rawleigh had glided over to the opposition under the subtle and the plotting Cecil.

An intrigue of less guiltiness than these dark machinations of heartless men banished Rawleigh from court. In the dalliance of the ladies of the privy-chamber, through the long tedious days of audience, he once too wittily threw out an observation on that seductive but spotless circle, the maids of honour, who, he declared were "like witches, who could do hurt, but do no good." There was one, however, the bewitching Throgmorton, who was all goodness; the impa.s.sioned knight was resistless; and subsequently the law consecrated what love had already irrevocably joined. But envy with its evil eye was peering. The Queen of Virgins, implacable in love-treasons, sent the lovers to the Tower.

In this desperate predicament, Rawleigh had lost in an hour the proud work of his highest ambition, the favour of his mistress-sovereign. The forlorn hero had recourse to one of those prompt and petty stratagems in which he was often so dexterous. At his prison-window, one day, he beheld the Queen pa.s.sing in her barge, and suddenly raved like a distracted lover. He entreated to be allowed to go in disguise to rest his eyes once more on the idol of his heart; and when the governor refused this extraordinary request of a state-prisoner, he, in his agony, struggled. Their daggers were clutched; till Sir Arthur Gorge, seeing "the cold iron walking about," rushed between these terrible combatants. All this, Gorge, then a friend of Rawleigh, minutely narrates in a letter to Cecil, at the same time gently hinting that, if the minister deem it proper, it may be communicated to the queen, that such was the miserable condition of Rawleigh, that he fell distracted only at the distant sight of her majesty. This theatrical scene was got up for the nonce, and served as a prologue to another characteristic effusion, a letter of raving gallantry, which Orlando Furioso himself might have penned, potent with the condensed essence of old romance. The amorist in his prison thus sorrows: "I 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 like a nymph; sometime sitting in the shade like a G.o.ddess, sometime singing like an angel."

Sir Walter knew how high the pulse beat of his royal mistress, now aged by her sixtieth year. He obtained his freedom, but was banished the presence. And now, cast out of court favour, and calling himself "The Queen's Captive," Rawleigh, whom many had feared and few had not admired, found that even fools had the courage to vex a banished favourite.

There was no hope; yet Rawleigh, in his exile at his own Sherborne, addressed more than one letter to the queen, warning her of "the dangers of a Spanish faction in Scotland." But the letters were received in silence. Rawleigh then attempted to awaken Cecil to the state of Ireland, then on the point of exploding into a rebellion. He compares himself to the Trojan soothsayer, "who cast his spear against the wooden horse, and was not believed." The language of complaint was not long tolerable to a spirit which would have commanded the world; and at once he took his flight from the old to the new, and his fleet and himself were again buoyant on the ocean.

This was Rawleigh's first voyage to "the empire of Guiana," as it was then called. His interesting narrative Hume has harshly condemned, as containing "the most palpable lies ever imposed on the credulity of mankind." Our romantic adventurer has incurred censure for his own credulity in search of mines which appear to have existed, and of "the golden city," which lying Spaniards had described; and he had even his honour impeached by the baffled speculators of his own day, whom he had beguiled with his dreams; but he who sacrificed life and fortune in a great enterprise, left the world a pledge that he at least believed in his own tale.

Rawleigh, like other men of genius, was influenced by the spirit of the age, which was the spirit of discovery; and to the brave and the resolved, what could be impracticable which opened a new world? The traditions of the Spaniards had been solemnly recorded in the collections of their voyages, and had been sanctioned by the reports of Rawleigh's own people: and he himself had fed his eyes and his dreams on the novel aspect of those fertile plains and branching rivers, inhabited by fifty nations; on animals of a new form, and birds of a new plumage; and on a vegetable world of trees and plants, and flowers, and fruits, on which the eye dwelt for the first time--a fresh creation, "the face of whose earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance."

The origin of those puerile tales which the Europeans brought home with them has not been traced. Some have the air of religious legends, descriptive of the Paradise of the Blacks, such as that chimerical Manoa, where they said, "the king had golden images of every object on earth." Or were such marvellous fictions the shrewd inventions of these children of nature, more cunning than the men of Europe, stupified and credulous from their sovereign pa.s.sion? When the Indians on the coast found that the whites seemed insatiate of gold and pearls, they fostered the madness, directing their strange invaders far up into the land, to the great city of Manoa, the El-Dorado of the Spaniards, and which no one ever reached. In this manner they probably designed to rid themselves of their ambiguous guests, sending them to stray in the deserts of primeval forests, or to sail along interminable rivers, wrecked amid rapid falls.

Rawleigh endured many miseries; and on his return his narrative was deemed fabulous. The pathos of his language, however, perpetuates his dignified affliction. "Of the little remaining fortune I had, I have wasted in effect all herein; I have undergone many constructions, been accompanied with many sorrows, with labour, hunger, heat, sickness, and peril. From myself I have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar and withered."

An enterprise which was, as he himself considered it to be, national, crushed the resources of the individual. He a.s.sures us that he might have enriched himself, had "it become the former fortune in which he once lived, and sorted with all the offices of honour, which by her majesty's grace he held that day in England, for him _to go journies of picory_;" that is, in Gondomar's plain Spanish "piracy;" for the Spaniards applied the term _picarro_, a rogue or thief, to every one sailing in their forbidden seas. The dedication of his narrative, though directed to Howard and Cecil, was evidently addressed to "the lady of ladies," who, however, could not break her enchanted silence.

Spain trembled at the efforts of a single hero of England; she seemed to antic.i.p.ate her uncertain dominion over that new world. Spain, though proud and mighty, standing on her golden feet, yet found them weak as unbaked clay, while her treasure-fleets were either burned or sunk, or carried into our ports. But at home there were those who dreaded the ascendancy of that bold spirit, which even in his present sad condition a.s.serted that "there were men worthy to be kings of these dominions, and who, by the queen's grace and leave, would undertake it of themselves."

His adversaries would cloak their private envy under the fair colour of the public safety, or seemed wise with prudential scepticism. Yet the dauntless soul of Rawleigh, amid his distresses, despatched two s.h.i.+ps under his devoted Keymis, to keep up the intercourse with the weak colony he had left behind; this was the second voyage to Guiana, which only increased the anxiety for a third, which soon followed.

It is a curious instance of that alarm of jealousy prevalent with the favourites of those days, that during the time of Rawleigh's disgrace at court merely his sudden appearance in the metropolis, as the news is cautiously indicated, "gave cause of discontent to some other"--that is, the reigning favourite, Ess.e.x; possibly there might be some cause, for the writer tells, that Rawleigh was "in good hope to return into grace;"[1] but this restorative was not then administered to the lorn stroller from Sherborne. The queen was imperturbable.

The royal anger of Elizabeth never interfered with her policy, nor dulled her sagacity. Two years after, in 1596, it was decided to attack the Spanish fleet in their own harbours, according to a plan laid down by Rawleigh, as far back as in 1588; he was now wanted, and therefore he was remembered, as far as his appointment, to be one of the four commanders in the famous expedition against Cadiz. Ess.e.x, as commander-in-chief, betrayed his incompetence, and Rawleigh the prompt energy of his military and his maritime abilities. Ess.e.x, at all times his rival, and never his friend, saw his own l.u.s.tre dusked by the eminence of his inferior; and on his return fatally read in the eyes of his royal mistress the first omen of his decline. During his absence, his recommendation of Sir Thomas Bodley for the secretarys.h.i.+p of state had been rejected, and the hated Cecil had triumphed. Rawleigh now undertook a more difficult affair than the victory of Cadiz--he effected an amicable arrangement between Cecil and Ess.e.x; and this seems to have been a most grateful service to the queen, for a month afterwards, we find him again at court. Five years must have elapsed,--so long the queen could preserve the royalty of her anger.

Restored to the queen's favour, the lover had lost nothing of his fascination. The very day on which Cecil led Rawleigh in "as captain of the guard," he rode in the evening with the queen, and held a private conference; where, probably, many secrets and counsels were divulged, too long and too proudly suppressed.[2] All this was done in the absence of Ess.e.x, but not without his consent: for the three enemies were now to be friends.