And let every lover skip No-she must be perfect snow, Then, if others share with me, Farewell, her, whate'er she be. These, however, must suffice as specimens of Raleigh's hours of tuneful idleness, and yet the temptation is not small to linger yet longer in his garden of poesy. But much yet remains to be told, and we will therefore now return to the rougher realities of history, which ordinarily possesses no quality belonging to poetry, unless it be fiction. The time had now come for the leaf that had faded and wilted, and was now withered to dryness, to fall from the tree. Elizabeth had heard herself called to follow poor Essex into that eternity whither she had capriciously and prematurely sent him. It was to her a sad summons, for the proud woman hated to die. If one could envy royalty, the spectacle of the dying queen would be no bad cure for his malady. She had said, after many years of experience, "to be a king and wear a crown, is a thing more glorious to them that see it, than it is pleasant to them that bear it." Her death gave utterance to the same truth with more eloquent emphasis still. There was the once wise, brave and proud daughter of the Tudor race, sunk in a melancholy so profound that no entreaties could prevail on her to take food or medicine. She refused to be placed upon her bed because she thought that if once laid there, she should never rise again. Cushions were arranged on the floor of her chamber, and there she sat day and night for a week, refusing food, rejecting sleep, entirely indifferent to everything around her, and breathing forth the burden of her soul in groans and sighs. Death was her companion, and with him her spirit held secret communings, reserved for the revelations of another day. The only case in which she could be roused occurred when her council spoke to her of the succession to the throne. The last flash of her old queen-like spirit shot up into a blaze, and then the light went out forever. "I told you,' (thus she spoke) "that my seat had been the seat of kings, and I will have no rascal to succeed me! Trouble me no more. He who comes after me, must be a king. I will have none but our cousin of Scotland." Posterity, alas! has furnished those who have thought, not without reason, that in her successor she had both king and rascal combined. When Elizabeth died, Raleigh lost his best support, for she knew his value and would not permit his ruin. Possibly her shrewdness might have discovered the hypocrisy of the friendship which Cecil professed for him. The cunning secretary had foreseen her death, and with characteristic villainy had opened a secret correspondence with James, who he knew must be her successor. With no little industry had he taken pains to be informed of the peculiarities of the pedantic fool who then held the throne of Scotland, and he accommodated his conduct to the whims and follies of the future king of England. True, Cecil had murdered Essex, and James had no love for any who were concerned in that deed of blood: true, Cecil had borne no small share in sending the.mother of James, the lovely queen of Scots, to the block: but what were obstacles like these in the way of such a man as Cecil? An ordinary being, possessed of nothing but the mere instincts of humanity, would have been led by those instincts alone to retire in despair from the task of conciliating and becoming a favorite with the man whose own mother he had helped to murder: but the instincts of Cecil were hardly those of humanity; and when we find that he had actually succeeded, and became the confidential adviser and secretary of James, one scarcely knows which to pronounce most wonderful, the cool effrontery of the murderer and the villain, or the unfilial forgetfulness of the unnatural wretch, who took to his confidence his mother's murderer. In the secret correspondence of Cecil with James (which would have cost the former his head had it been but suspected by the proud old queen), he took care to play upon his cowardice and arouse his prejudices by anticipation against those who were at all renowned in war. The miserable old woman who, though he wore a crown, yet shuddered at the sight of a naked sword, and cried out "treason" when his carver accidentally nicked his finger, which, with royal politeness he had thrust into the dish, was easily led to believe that Raleigh, and men like Raleigh, would keep his kingdom perpetually embroiled in war. James, therefore, had scarcely mounted the throne before it was plain that the sun of Raleigh's prosperity had set. The deprivation of his offices was among the first acts of the new king's reign this was the secret work of Cecil, but little did the victim suppose that the deep-laid schemes of the cunning secretary, whom he now found to be his enemy, reached far beyond the mere loss of office, and were destined to find their consummation in his ignominious death. To say that James was an egregious fool, is not necessarily to say that he was either mischievous or dangerous, for a mere fool may be harmless and call for our pity as one of heaven's innocents, but to say that James was a conceited fool is at once to pronounce that he was a very dangerous man; for as a king he had power enough to do harm, and as a fool he was wiser in his own conceit than seven men who could render a reason; so that he presented the fearful union of oracular stupidity with irresponsible power. It was not difficult to create in such a mind as that of James a dislike of such a man as Raleigh. The one, profoundly impressed with a sense of his own sagacity, loved, by secret, though clumsy management, to astonish the court, as he supposed, with some magnificent outbreak of royal wisdom, as asinine as it was pretending; while the other, who had naturally "high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,' knew not how to gain honorable ends by any other than honorable means, and felt contempt for the royal sagacity. James was a coward-Raleigh was brave. James was ready to purchase peace of Spain even on inglorious terms-Raleigh thought of England's glory, and looked on Spain as a proud enemy that ought to be crushed. James had no English feeling, and looked with no pride to England's ships and sailors-Raleigh looked far ahead, and saw, what facts have since proved, that the strength of England must be in ships and sailors. James professed to be a man of letters, and Raleigh was so. The difference was be James tween one who reads and one who thinks as well as reads. might, perhaps, tell readily what he had read in Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas; and Raleigh could tell whether Duns Scotus and the seraphic doctor had written sense or nonsense. With the one, learning was the end of thought—with the other, learning was the material with which thought began. Raleigh had a mind strikingly original-the mind of James was but the lumber-garret in which confusedly to stow away other men's thoughts. As soon as the wily Cecil had found that his efforts to excite the royal prejudice against Raleigh were successful, his next step was to ensnare his victim in toils which his own hand had long been secretly preparing, and by an accusation of treason, which he knew to be without foundation, to bring his dreaded rival to the block. With the full light that modern historical research has shed on this subject, it is impossible not to abhor the character of Robert Cecil. It was he who, at the very moment when he professed to be the friend of Raleigh-at the very time when his own son was sheltered under the roof of Raleigh, and was receiving at his hands not hospitality merely, but the exhibition of an affectionate interest little short of parental-it was he who under such circumstances was deliberately plotting the future murder of the man on whom he fawned, and who stood in the way of his unholy ambition. A poor, weak fool, Lord Cobham, was involved in transactions to which Cecil well knew he could give the aspect of a traitorous intercourse with foreign powers, and, relying on the fears and stupidity of Cobham, he hoped by his testimony to implicate and convict Raleigh. This was the outline of his plan, and it needed for its successful accomplishment nothing but the proper selection of a court and jury sufficiently compliant, a vindictive prosecuting attorney, and a total perversion of the established laws of evidence. Most men bent on the perpetration of judicial murder would have paused in the contemplation of these difficult prerequisites to the conviction of an innocent man; but Robert Cecil was not one to be deterred from his object by difficulties. He moulded the court (of which he himself was a member) to suit his ends. He knew that Coke, the king's attorney, could be vindictive enough, if it were but whispered to him that royalty expected it; his jury it was easy to select, and as for the law, the court was its proper expounder. When villainy had made all things ready, Raleigh, most unexpectedly to himself, was arrested to answer to the charge of being a traitor to his country by entering into secret engagements with Spain, the nation of all others which he had most uniformly opposed in its attempts, and to which he had probably done more injury by his wisdom and prowess than any other man then living in England. From the moment of his arrest the very consciousness of his innocence convinced him that he was a doomed man; and he had too much sagacity not to see who it was that was thirsting for his blood, and had prepared the machinery for his condemnation. But in this new and appalling position, in which the providence of heaven had placed him, he was true to his lofty character. There is something to command more than respect: we feel reverence as we look upon the calm dignity and self-possession with which he rose above the feelings of ordinary men, and girded himself in his moral and intellectual strength to meet the emergency. We hear from him no clamors about the persecution which was dragging him to the scaffold; no cry against the premeditated injustice which he knew to be in store for him. These were subjects to be treated of in another place than a prisonthese were themes for the hall of justice. It was not the custom of that day to allow to the accused the benefit of professional aid on his trial. He was aware, therefore, that he was called on to meet (without having made law his study) all the skill and astuteness of Coke (the ablest lawyer of his day), whetted to keenness by personal hatred, and all the inclination in an unfriendly bench to pervert and wrest the law to his ruin. The unfortunate prisoner too knew full well that he had not the sympathy of the people. To his honor be it said, that he had never stooped by unworthy means to make himself a favorite with the populace. Like a great judge of modern times, the only popularity he valued was "that which follows not that which is run after." Those who knew him, and were in immediate employment about him, loved him to the last with a fidelity that death only could destroy; but |