d the best part of my fortune, hating the
tyrannous prosperity of that State, and it were now strange and
monstrous that I should become an enemy to my country and conscience.'
Two months later he was threatened with the loss of his post as
Vice-Admiral if he did not withdraw a fleet he had fitted out to harass
the Spaniards in the Newfoundland waters. About the same time he
strengthened his connection with the Leicester faction by marrying his
cousin, Barbara Gamage, to Sir Philip Sidney's younger brother Robert.
This lady became the grandmother of Waller's Sacharissa. The collapse of
the Virginian colony was an annoyance in the summer of this year, but it
was tempered to Raleigh by the success of another of his enterprises,
his fleet in the Azores. One of the prizes brought home by this purely
piratical expedition was a Spanish colonial governor of much fame and
dignity, Don Pedro Sarmiento. Raleigh demanded a ransom for this
personage, and while it was being collected he entertained his prisoner
sumptuously in Durham House.

On October 7, 1586, Raleigh's old friend Sir Philip Sidney closed his
chivalrous career on the battle-field at Zutphen. Raleigh's solemn elegy
on him is one of the finest of the many poems which that sad event
called forth. It blends the passion of personal regret with the dignity
of public grief, as all great elegiacal poems should. One stanza might
be inscribed on a monument to Sidney:

England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same;
Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;
The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died;
Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtues' fame.

This elegy appeared with the rest in _Astrophel_ in 1595; but it had
already been printed, in 1593, in the _Phoenix Nest_, and as early as
1591 Sir John Harington quotes it as Raleigh's.

It was not till the following spring that Raleigh took possession of
certain vast estates in Ireland. The Queen had named him among the
'gentlemen-undertakers,' between whom the escheated lands of the Earl of
Desmond were to be divided. He received about forty-two thousand acres
in the counties of Cork, Waterford, and Tipperary, and he set about
repeopling this desolate region with his usual vigour of action. He
brought settlers over from the West of England, but these men were not
supported or even encouraged at Dublin Castle. 'The doting Deputy,' as
Raleigh calls him, treated his Devonshire farmers with less
conside