f self, some personal
ambition or private object to be gained. His life is a record of
undertakings begun in enthusiasm, maintained imperfectly, and failures
in the end. Among his other adventures he had sent a colony to Virginia.
He had imagined, or had been led by others to believe, that there was an
Indian Court there brilliant as Montezuma's, an enlightened nation
crying to be admitted within the charmed circle of Gloriana's subjects.
His princes and princesses proved things of air, or mere Indian savages;
and of Raleigh there remains nothing in Virginia save the name of the
city which is called after him. The starving survivors of his settlement
on the Roanoke River were taken on board by Drake's returning squadron
and carried home to England, where they all arrived safely, to the glory
of God, as our pious ancestors said and meant in unconventional
sincerity, on the 28th of July, 1586.

The expedition, as I have said, barely paid its cost. In the shape of
wages the officers received nothing, and the crews but a few pounds a
man; but there was, perhaps, not one of them who was not better pleased
with the honour which he had brought back than if he had come home
loaded with doubloons.

Startled Catholic Europe meanwhile rubbed its eyes and began to see that
the 'enterprise of England,' as the intended invasion was called, might
not be the easy thing which the seminary priests described it. The
seminary priests had said that so far as England was Protestant at all
it was Protestant only by the accident of its Government, that the
immense majority of the people were Catholic at heart and were thirsting
for a return to the fold, that on the first appearance of a Spanish army
of deliverance the whole edifice which Elizabeth had raised would
crumble to the ground. I suppose it is true that if the world had then
been advanced to its present point of progress, if there had been then
recognised a Divine right to rule in the numerical majority, even
without a Spanish army the seminary priests would have had their way.
Elizabeth's Parliaments were controlled by the municipalities of the
towns, and the towns were Protestant. A Parliament chosen by universal
suffrage and electoral districts would have sent Cecil and Walsingham
into private life or to the scaffold, replaced the Mass in the churches,
and reduced the Queen, if she had been left on the throne, into the
humble servant of the Pope and Philip. It would not perhaps ha