mb, yet fear I to fall.

Elizabeth capped it with

If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.

[Sidenote: _Not Improbable._]

Some of Ralegh's later biographers have felt so intensely the
seriousness of their task, that they either omit or ridicule the legend.
The whole appeared first in the _Worthies_, published in 1662. No
documentary proof can be given of its veracity; and there is no
disproof. The opportunity might easily have occurred; and Ralegh was of
an eagerness and an adroitness not to have let it slip. Undoubtedly the
anecdote has the intrinsic merit beyond the rest of pointing to the
final and determining agent in his change of fortune. All the other
answers to the enigma may contain an ingredient of truth. Leicester
would recognize his capacity, and might have been ready to use him.
Sussex would perceive the danger of allowing so redoubtable a free lance
to pass to a rival service. Walsingham and Burleigh were manifestly
impressed with his extraordinary sagacity and strength of will. His
Irish services, which had called forth the admiration of Grey himself so
long as Ralegh fought under him, could not fail to be appreciated by the
Queen's wise councillors. He was backed by the vast family circles of
the Gilberts and Champernouns. In his later life he could speak of 'an
hundred gentlemen of my kindred.' He was no novice at the Court itself,
which he had studied for years before it recognized him as an inmate.
But Leicester and Sussex, like Grey, and even Burleigh and Walsingham,
though they might have employed him, and have bandied him among them,
would have concurred in keeping him in the background. To Elizabeth
herself may confidently be ascribed the personal decision that he was to
be acknowledged, and not merely used, but distinguished.

[Sidenote: _The Queen's Choice._]

To the Queen he owed his emergence from an obscurity, which posterity
wonders to find enveloping him till thirty. His was not a nature which
ripens late. As a boy at home, as an undergraduate at Oxford, as an
adventurer in France, as a seaman in the Atlantic, as a military leader
in Munster, as a commencing courtier, he might have been expected to
flash forth from the mass of his comrades. No apathy of contemporary
opinion is to blame for the long delay. Rather it was the hurry and the
glitter of contemporary life. A nation, like the English under
Elizabeth, facing the dawn of a new age, does not pause to mark degrees
of ind