and looks like Ralegh's. She played
upon his Christian name, writing it as she and others pronounced it,
Water. She enjoyed the anger her kindness aroused in other admirers,
such as Hatton. He was willing to offer the homage for which she
thirsted. So were other courtiers by the dozen. Cautious methodical
George Carew wrote to her when she was seventy, and nearing the grave,
envying 'the blessing others enjoy in beholding your Royal person whose
beauty adorns the world.' Of sensual love between her and Ralegh there
is not a tittle of evidence which will be accepted by any who do not
start by presuming in her the morals of a courtesan. In support of the
calumny, passages of the _Faerie Queene_ have been cited, in which the
poet has been interpreted as literally and as illiberally as the
courtier. Fastidious Spenser would have shuddered to imagine the coarse
construction against his Queen to which his delicate allegories were to
be wrested. Had there been ground for the legend, we may feel tolerably
certain that Lady Ralegh would have known of it. She could not have
refrained from hinting at a motive for the wrath with which, it will
hereafter be seen, her mistress visited her transgression.

[Sidenote: _Ralegh's Versatility._]

Ralegh himself may not have been sufficiently careful to guard against a
fable flattering to his charms, if injurious to his independence. He
furthered malignant humours in his own time by his fondness for personal
adornment. His lavish vanity seems to have been taken as proof of his
and his Sovereign's amours. He must in any case, by no fault of his own,
but by the excessive bounty of nature in heaping courtly graces upon
him, have been exposed to the liability of misconstruction by later
ages. Measured by his force of character and his acts he has as little
as possible in common with a Leicester or a Hatton. Yet posterity,
misled by tradition, has never been sure whether his distinctive
vocation were not that of a fine gentleman. Contemporaries, partly from
misapprehension, partly from admiration, and partly from jealousy, tried
to fasten him to that. When the splendour of his exploits by sea and
land demonstrated him to be more than a courtier, they ranked him as
seaman or swordsman. His versatility lent itself to the error, and
operated to the disappointment of his real aim. His constant effort was
to be accepted and trusted as a serious statesman. He might have
attained his end more complete