ticism,
reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the
Spaniards had set them their unworthy precedent. But
the Elizabethan navigators, full without exception of
large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty, bear
names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime
against the savages; and the name of England was as
famous in the Indian seas as that of Spain was
infamous. On the banks of the Oronooko there was
remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who
had come there from the great Queen beyond the seas;
and Raleigh speaks the language of the heart of his
country, when he urges the English statesmen to colonize
Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving
the white marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the
Incas to the throne of Peru.

"Who will not be persuaded," he says, "that now at length
the great Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans,
and lamentations, hath seen the tears and blood of so many
millions of innocent men, women, and children, afflicted,
robbed, reviled, branded with hot irons, roasted, dismembered,
mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked, scalded with hot
oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in sport,
drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and
purposeth to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to
take the yoke of servitude from that distressed people, as
free by nature as any Christian."

Poor Raleigh! if peace and comfort in this world
were of much importance to him, it was in an ill day
that he provoked the revenge of Spain. The strength
of England was needed at the moment at its own door;
the Armada came, and there was no means of executing
such an enterprise. And afterwards the throne of
Elizabeth was filled by a Stuart, and Guiana was to be
no scene of glory for Raleigh; but, as later historians
are pleased to think, it was the grave of his reputation.

But the hope burned clear in him through all the
weary years of unjust imprisonment; and when he was
a grey-headed old man, the base son of a bad mother
used it to betray him. The success of his last enterprise
was made the condition under which he was to be
pardoned for a crime which he had not committed; and
its success depended, as he knew, on its being kept
secret from the Spaniards. James required of him on
his allegiance a detail of what he proposed, giving him
at the same time his word as a king that the