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sort of Reformed Crusader; but he was not the less eminently practical, though exceedingly loose, in the view he took of his opportunities and duties. He chased galleons, or caught negroes, or was ready, like old Drake, to sell his prisoners to the " Mowers," with little remorse. But he prayed with fervour as he went filibustering, and planned wisely or executed valiantly the enterprises devised by his patriotism and cupidity. He was himself made up of contrasts-a soldier and merchant-a colonist and spoiler-half a pirate, yet half a statesman; and his life was spent amid other contrasts, geographical and historical. As he went to and fro from the old world to the new, he belonged himself to two different epochs. Combining a vague and heroic instinct with definite and political functions, he was just such a phenomenon as classic nations might have witnessed, had Argonautic expeditions been organised by Constantine, or Ulysses gone wandering in the days of Augustus.

If such was the description of man who played the first part in that famous drama, we must allow that Mr. Motley has done justice to his competitors, for he has acquired the key to the motives of the other leading combatants, who claimed the free pathways of the ocean as private easements of their own domain. These pregnant years had a secret history, which is now laid bare by the recent exploration of the Spanish Royal archives. These archives were fading under the dust of two centuries when the French carried them from Simancas to Paris, whence the major part of them, we infer, were returned in 1815. Mr. Motley has examined such of the originals as remained in Paris, and he has seen the copies of the still more important residue which have been transcribed for Belgium, with the assent of the Spanish Government. Searching these for details of the great conspiracy of King and Pontiff against the human race-the issue cannot be stated as short of this-he has found traces of the action of individuals so new and startling, that we peruse them with

the interest which attaches to the confessions of the condemned. The dreams of the sixteenth-century plotters are connected with their devices, their ambitions are seen corrected by their impotence and ignorance, and we rise from this wreck of vast designs, illuminated by petty motives, as if we were reading a new chapter on the recesses of the human heart.

It is almost appalling to estimate the consequences which hung, or seemed to hang, on the breath of one man, and that man a cold and narrow spirit, the dreamer of an impossible empire, the servant of a creed outworn. Looking upon history largely, century by century, we cannot fail of perceiving that the agencies of individuals, however transcendant, are a minor consideration. They belong to the class of accidents which are rectified by time, and they recede with their authors before the great battalions-the broad principles and grave interests which compel the aggregate of results. The sum total of ten centuries will scarcely show a trace of their partial, exceptional, and disturbing interventions; and yet individuals for a season may seem almost to hold the destiny of their nation, or species, in suspense, and may really so influence the fate of at least one generation. There have been many conjunctions in the world's horoscope when the will or intellect of one person has told for more than at other times; but there has been no age in modern history in which individuals counted for so much as in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the age of the reaction against the Reformation and its consequences. Their importance then was derived from many causes, and it may be stated in a volume or (assuming the reader to be conversant with the facts) abridged into a sentence. The European races by this time had grown into nations constituting organised Powers, and capable of a foreign policy—that is, capable of energetic and prompt action beyond their own boundaries, at the will of their rulers. They had not yet obtained the keys of that

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policy which were kept in royal cabinets and diplomatic ciphers. This was the age when diplomatists built on foundations of the shifting sand. It was the golden age of pure, unfettered statecraft, when it had the largest field for its officious talents, and the least possible restraint on their exercise or abuse. Never before had kings or their ministers such vast resources; never since have these resources been so exclusively their own.

This will explain why little people enacted great parts, and filled the world with their names and the fame of their imputed genius. It is the function of scholars in this age, with the industry of Mr. Motley, to tumble over their cabinets, and to show them for what they were. Philip of Spain, that great historical spider, whose web spreads over the whole. world of his trembling contemporaries, comes out after this test little better than a scooped turnip. Mr. Motley, taking us by the hand, opens the door of a remote closet, and there is the dispenser of destiny in his actual dimensions. "A small, dull, elderly, imperfectly educated, patient, plodding invalid, with white hair and protruding under jaw and dreary visage, is sitting day after day, seldom speaking, never smiling, seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four, at a writing-table covered with heaps of interminable despatches, in a cabinet far away beyond the seas and the mountains, in the very heart of Spain." Clerks come and go, noiselessly opening and shutting the door, from time to time, bringing fresh bundles of letters, and taking away others, "all written and composed by secretaries and high functionaries, and all to be scrawled over in the margin by the diligent old man in a big schoolboy's hand and style-if ever schoolboy, even in the sixteenth century, could write so illegibly or express himself so awkwardly." Couriers in the courtyard are arriving from or departing for the uttermost parts of the earth, fetching and carrying this interminable correspondence, scrawled with its significant tokens of weal or woe to the larger proportion

of the human race. The world is rolling on its course; the age is an age of movement, of heroic combative action, from its populous marts and capitals to its most secret shores and seas, and this man sits apart from all, fixing its destiny upon foolscap, with upstroke and downstroke, as assiduous and almost as imperturbable as Fate.

"The

There is a seeming grandeur in his patience and tenacity of purpose, and with bated breath we look over his shoulder to discover-what? A most important despatch-in which the king, with his own hand, is supposed to be conveying secret intelligence to Mendoza concerning the Armada, together with minute directions for the regulations of Guise's conduct at the memorable epoch of the barricades-contains but a single comment from the monarch's own pen. Armada has been in Lisbon about a month-quassi un mes," wrote the secretary. "There is but one 's' in quasi," annotates Philip. Again, a despatch of Mendoza contains the intelligence that our Elizabeth, at the date of the letter, is residing at St. James's. Philip has here an opportunity to display his knowledge of English topography. "St. James's," he says, "is a house of recreation, which was once a monastery. There is a park between it and the palace which is called Huytal; but why it is called Huytal I am sure I don't know." His researches in English had not enabled him to recognise the abstruse compound of adjective and substantive which constitute Whitehall. On another occasion a letter from England conveys important intelligence of the muster to resist the Spanish invasion, the quantity of gunpowder and various munitions collected, with other details of like nature, and adds this information, acceptable in an age of portents-"In the windows of the Queen's presence-chamber they have discovered a great quantity of lice, all clustered together." Philip, disregarding the soldiers and the gunpowder, comments only on the last-mentioned incident, and that cautiously, as befits a king surnamed the

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Prudent. But perhaps," he interpolates, "they were fleas."

Nevertheless, as much as any one individual since Charlemagne, this pettifogger was the owner or arbiter of the entire globe. Assiduous, tedious, frivolous, épicier à son insu—a grocer without knowing it-he was the Colossus or rather the Atlas of the Catholic world. An Atlas with a crick in his spine, but with crutches of unusual strength. The Spanish peninsula was but the core of his empire, with its great cities and its martial citizens. Cadiz, as populous at that day as London, seated by the Straits where the ancient and modern systems of traffic were blending, like the mingling of the two oceans; Granada, the ancient wealthy seat of the fallen Moors; Madrid, enriched by its artistic treasures; Toledo, Valladolid, and Lisbon, chief city of the recently conquered kingdom of Portugal, counting, with its suburbs, a larger population than any city, excepting Paris, in Europe, -the mother of distant colonies and the capital of the rapidly developing traffic with both the Indies-these were some of the arsenals of Philip in the Iberian peninsula. But Philip possessed Sicily also, the better portion of Italy, and important dependencies in Africa; while the famous maritime discoveries of the age had all contributed to Spanish aggrandisement. "The world seemed suddenly to have expanded its wings from east to west only to bear the fortunate Spanish empire to the most dizzy heights of wealth and power." The most accomplished generals, the most disciplined and daring infantry the world had ever known, the best equipped and most extensive navy, royal and mercantile, of the age, were at the absolute command of the Sovereign; and this Sovereign was, moreover, paramount in the councils of France and Germany. To pass over the former for a moment, the latter was in its normal state of suspended animation, under a star-gazing Emperor-that foolish patron of folly, Rudolph. Its peasants had got their Augsburg Confession, and its