the
depths he braced himself to the task of rising to the surface, and
reaching shore. Life, freedom, wealth, career, were forfeited. He
determined to redeem the whole. He availed himself of the instruments at
hand, though they were tarnished. He did not scruple to soil his fingers
in groping his way out of a sea of mud.

[Sidenote: _Doggedness of Purpose._]

It is necessary continually to remind ourselves, when we are tempted to
be incensed at his deportment, of the mode in which he had been treated,
of his consuming sense of a mission, and his determination, little short
of monomania, to return to its service. He and everybody knew that his
conviction was an act of legal violence. There was no prospect of rescue
through the machinery of the law from an overwhelming disaster which
demonstrated law to be without a conscience or sense of responsibility.
As soon as the law with its automatic violence had possession of his
case, he felt himself held in a grasp not to be relaxed. He knew he must
look outside law for justice as well as mercy. It and its ministers were
not intentionally cruel. Simply their craft had assumed a scientific
shape from which morality and common sense alike were absent. A
defendant had a right to evade the penalties of the most manifest guilt
by any loopholes and gaps he could discover in the works. It had the
right to pursue him to the death, whether innocent or criminal, so long
as the rules of the art were observed. Its point of honour was not to
let the accused escape. Ralegh was penetrated with an acute and
indignant consciousness of the iniquity of the Court intrigue from which
he suffered. He despaired of correcting the wrong by the help of the law
which had lent itself to be the agent. His struggle was to salve the
malice of law with the remorse of the Prerogative which had been seduced
into setting it in motion. The shape his efforts took was by no means
admirable. Had he been more uniformly heroic, or less absolutely
irrepressible, he would have gone to his prison, and laid himself down
magnanimously or passively mute. There, early or late, he would have
died. Never would his foes have opened the doors of their own good will.
But his nature was not of that kind. He burnt with a longing to be up
and doing. He knew he was caught in toils he could not burst by force.
For his career's sake, he condescended to plead with and beseech them
through whom alone he could emerge into the daylight.