e egress from Newport, or Gravelines, or Sluys, or
Flushing, or Dunkirk; and longing to grapple with the Duke of Parma,
so soon as his fleet of gunboats and hoys, packed with his Spanish and
Italian veterans, should venture to set forth upon the sea for their
long-prepared exploit.

It was a pompous spectacle that midsummer night upon those narrow
seas. The moon, which was at the full, was rising calmly upon a scene
of anxious expectation. Would she not be looking, by the morrow's
night, upon a subjugated England, a reenslaved Holland--upon the
downfall of civil and religious liberty? Those ships of Spain, which
lay there with their banners waving in the moonlight, discharging
salvos of anticipated triumph and filling the air with strains of
insolent music--would they not, by daybreak, be moving straight to
their purpose, bearing the conquerors of the world to the scene of
their cherished hopes?

That English fleet, too, which rode there at anchor, so anxiously on
the watch--would that swarm of nimble, lightly handled, but slender
vessels, which had held their own hitherto in hurried and desultory
skirmishes, be able to cope with their great antagonist, now that the
moment had arrived for the death grapple? Would not Howard, Drake,
Frobisher, Seymour, Winter, and Hawkins be swept out of the straits at
last, yielding an open passage to Medina, Oquendo, Recalde, and
Farnese? Would those Hollanders and Zeelanders cruising so vigilantly
among their treacherous shallows dare to maintain their post now that
the terrible "Holoferness," with his invincible legions, was resolved
to come forth?

And the impatience of the soldiers and sailors on board the fleet was
equal to that of their commanders. There was London almost before
their eyes--a huge mass of treasure, richer and more accessible than
those mines beyond the Atlantic which had so often rewarded Spanish
chivalry with fabulous wealth. And there were men in those galleons
who remembered the sack of Antwerp eleven years before; men who could
tell, from personal experience, how helpless was a great commercial
city when once in the clutch of disciplined brigands; men who in that
dread "fury of Antwerp" had enriched themselves in an hour with the
accumulations of a merchant's lifetime, and who had slain fathers and
mothers, sons and daughters, brides and bridegrooms, before each
other's eyes, until the number of inhabitants butchered in the blazing
streets rose to many th