ame by the composition of the Faery Queen. This great work
appeared in 1589, with a preface addressed to Raleigh and a considerable
apparatus of recommendatory poems; one of which, a sonnet of great
elegance, is marked with initials which assign it to the same
patronizing friend.

The proceedings of the administration against papists accused of
treasonable designs or practices, began about this time to excite
considerable perturbation in the public mind; for though circumstances
were brought to light which seemed to justify in some degree the worst
suspicions entertained of this faction, a system of conduct on the part
of the government also became apparent which no true Englishman could
without indignation and horror contemplate. The earl of Leicester,
besides partaking with the other confidential advisers of her majesty in
the blame attached to the general character of the measures now pursued,
lay under the popular imputation of making these acts of power
subservient, in many atrocious instances, to his private purposes of
rapacity or vengeance, and a cloud of odium was raised against him which
the breath of his indulgent sovereign was in vain exerted to disperse.

There was in Warwickshire a catholic gentleman named Somerville, a
person of violent temper and somewhat disordered in mind, who had been
worked up, by the instigations of one Hall his confessor, to such a
pitch of fanatical phrensy, that he set out for London with the fixed
purpose of killing the queen; but falling furiously upon some of her
protestant subjects by the way, he was apprehended, and readily
confessed the object of his journey. Being closely questioned, perhaps
with torture, he is said to have dropped something which touched Mr.
Arden his father-in-law; and Hall on examination positively declared
that this gentleman had been made privy to the bloody purpose of
Somerville. On this bare assertion of the priest, unconfirmed, as
appears, by any collateral evidence, Arden was indicted, found guilty,
and underwent the whole sentence of the law. It happened to be publicly
known that Arden was the personal enemy of Leicester, for he had refused
to wear his livery;--a base kind of homage which was paid him without
scruple, as it seems, by other neighbouring gentlemen;--and he was also
in the habit of reproaching him with the murder of his first wife. The
wife also of Arden was the sister of sir Nicholas Throgmorton, whom
Leicester was vulgarly suppos