German and the Gaul; had by
subterranean means checkmated the designs of the Medici; had traced his
way through plot and counter-plot, hated by most, loved by none save,
maybe, his Royal mistress to whom he was now more a custom than a
cherished friend. Year upon year he had built up his influence. None had
championed him save himself, and even from the consequences of rashness
and folly he had risen to a still higher place in the kingdom. But such
as Leicester are ever at last a sacrifice to the laborious means by
which they achieve their greatest ends-means contemptible and small.

To the great intriguers every little detail, every commonplace
insignificance is used--and must be used by them alone--to further their
dark causes. They cannot trust their projects to brave lieutenants, to
faithful subordinates. They cannot say, "Here is the end; this is the
work to be done; upon your shoulders be the burden!" They must "stoop to
conquer." Every miserable detail becomes of moment, until by-and-by the
art of intrigue and conspiracy begins to lose proportion in their minds.
The detail has ever been so important, conspiracy so much second nature,
that they must needs be intriguing and conspiring when the occasion is
trifling and the end negligible.

To all intriguers life has lost romance; there is no poem left in
nature; no ideal, personal, public or national, detains them in its
wholesome influence; no great purpose allures them; they have no
causes for which to die--save themselves. They are so honeycombed with
insincerity and the vice of thought, that by-and-by all colours are as
one, all pathways the same; because, whichever hue of light breaks upon
their world they see it through the grey-cloaked mist of falsehood; and
whether the path be good or bad they would still walk in it crookedly.
How many men and women Leicester had tracked or lured to their doom;
over how many men and women he had stepped to his place of power,
history speaks not carefully; but the traces of his deeds run through a
thousand archives, and they suggest plentiful sacrifices to a subverted
character.

Favourite of a Queen, he must now stoop to set a trap for the ruin of
as simple a soul as ever stepped upon the soil of England; and his dark
purposes had not even the excuse of necessity on the one hand, of love
or passion on the other. An insane jealousy of the place the girl had
won in the consideration of the Queen, of her lover who, he though