I pray consider. Think
ye, ye see the mothers left alive tendering their offspring in your
presence, 'nam matribus detestata bells,'" continued the orator. "Think
also of others of all sexes, ages, and conditions, on their knees before
your Alteza, most humbly praying and crying most dolorously to spare
their lives, and save their property from the ensanguined scourge of the
insane soldiers," and so on, and so on.

Now Philip II. was slow in resolving, slower in action. The ponderous
three-deckers of Biscay were notoriously the dullest sailers ever known,
nor were the fettered slaves who rowed the great galleys of Portugal or
of Andalusia very brisk in their movements; and yet the King might have
found time to marshal his ideas and his squadrons, and the Armada had
leisure to circumnavigate the globe and invade England afterwards, if a
succession of John Rogerses could have entertained his Highness with
compliments while the preparations were making.

But Alexander--at the very outset of the Doctor's eloquence--found it
difficult to suppress his feelings. "I can assure your Majesty," said
Rogers, "that his eyes--he has a very large eye--were moistened.
Sometimes they were thrown upward to heaven, sometimes they were fixed
full upon me, sometimes they were cast downward, well declaring how his
heart was affected."

Honest John even thought it necessary to mitigate the effect of his
rhetoric, and to assure his Highness that it was, after all, only he
Doctor Rogers, and not the minister plenipotentiary of the Queen's most
serene Majesty, who was exciting all this emotion.

"At this part of my speech," said he, "I prayed his Highness not to be
troubled, for that the same only proceeded from Doctor Rogers, who, it
might please him to know, was so much moved with the pitiful case of
these countries, as also that which of war was sure to ensue, that I
wished, if my body were full of rivers of blood, the same to be poured
forth to satisfy any that were blood-thirsty, so there might an assured
peace follow."

His Highness, at any rate, manifesting no wish to drink of such
sanguinary streams--even had the Doctor's body contained them--Rogers
became calmer. He then descended from rhetoric to jurisprudence and
casuistry, and argued at intolerable length the propriety of commencing
the conferences at Ostend, and of exhibiting mutually the commissions.

It is quite unnecessary to follow him as closely as did Farnese. When he