t. Her
commander landed in haste, and eagerly sought the place where the
English lord admiral and his captains were standing. His name was
Fleming; he was the master of a Scotch privateer; and he told the
English officers that he had that morning seen the Spanish Armada off
the Cornish coast. At this exciting information the captains began to
hurry down to the water, and there was a shouting for the ships' boats;
but Drake coolly checked his comrades, and insisted that the match
should be played out. He said that there was plenty of time both to win
the game and beat the Spaniards. The best and bravest match that ever
was scored was resumed accordingly. Drake and his friends aimed their
last bowls with the same steady, calculating coolness with which they
were about to point their guns. The winning cast was made; and then they
went on board and prepared for action, with their hearts as light and
their nerves as firm as they had been on the Hoe bowling green.

Meanwhile the messengers and signals had been despatched fast and far
through England, to warn each town and village that the enemy had come
at last. In every seaport there was instant making ready by land and by
sea; in every shire and every city there was instant mustering of horse
and man. But England's best defence then, as ever, was in her fleet;
and, after warping laboriously out of Plymouth harbor against the wind,
the lord admiral stood westward under easy sail, keeping an anxious
look-out for the armada, the approach of which was soon announced by
Cornish fisher-boats and signals from the Cornish cliffs.

It is not easy, without some reflection and care, to comprehend the full
extent of the peril which England then ran from the power and the
ambition of Spain, or to appreciate the importance of that crisis in the
history of the world. Queen Elizabeth had found at her accession an
encumbered revenue, a divided people, and an unsuccessful foreign war,
in which the last remnant of our possessions in France had been lost;
she had also a formidable pretender to her crown, whose interests were
favored by all the Roman Catholic powers. It is true that, during the
years of her reign which had passed away before the attempted invasion
of 1588, she had revived the commercial prosperity, the national spirit,
and the national loyalty of England. But her resources to cope with the
colossal power of Philip II still seemed most scanty; and she had not a
single foreign a