w. He stationed himself in the distant Armoury, where he
could see without being seen. Afterwards he was sorry, he said, for it;
since he heard that the Earl had inquired for him, desiring to have been
reconciled.

[Sidenote: _His Part in the Catastrophe._]

His aspect is reported to have been sad and gloomy, as he was rowed back
to Durham House. With his nature, and his gifts of imagination, he could
not but have been awed by the consummation he had witnessed of a tragic
doom. Later he believed he had always lamented the fate of Essex as the
beginning of a new peril to himself from those who before had needed his
support against a powerful rival. He may already have had a
presentiment. He could rightly declare that the death was not his work.
Essex was his own undoer. A time had been at which Ralegh would gladly
have become his firm friend. His emphatic concurrence, recorded by
Rowland Whyte, with Lady Ralegh's wish that there were 'love and concord
amongst all' was not hypocritical. In all sincerity he had written twice
in that spirit in the spring of 1600 to Lady Essex. He had found it of
no use; and a period came when he rejoiced in an inveterate enemy's
discomfiture. It is fanciful to affirm that he would have been pleased
to assist in turning aside the final shock of ruin. His sentiments
towards Essex at the end, unhappily, are too certain for the precise
meaning of his enigmatical undated letter to Cecil, discovered among the
Hatfield papers, to be of much consequence. Of its authenticity there is
no real doubt, though Mr. Charles Kingsley, whose enthusiasm for Ralegh
is delightful and unmixed, chooses to question it on the slender ground
that it is signed by initials, and that the style is, to his taste,
unlike Ralegh's. Its exact meaning is much more open to dispute. Here it
is:--

[Sidenote: _Advice to Cecil._]

'I am not wise enough to give you advice; but if you take it for a good
counsel to relent towards this tyrant, you will repent it when it shall
be too late. His malice is fixed, and will not evaporate by any your
mild courses. For he will ascribe the alteration to her Majesty's
pusillanimity, and not to your good nature: knowing that you work but
upon her humour, and not out of any love towards him. The less you make
him, the less he shall be able to harm you and yours. And if her
Majesty's favour fail him, he will again decline to a common person. For
after revenges fear them not; for your own fat