the Queen, or else his heart would break. He drew his
dagger on his keeper, Sir George Carew, and broke the knuckles of Sir
Arthur Gorges, because he said they were restraining him from the sight
of his Mistress. He proposed to Lord Howard of Effingham at the close of
a business letter, that he should be thrown to feed the lions, 'to save
labour,' as the Queen was still so cruel. Sir Arthur Gorges was in
despair; he thought that Raleigh was going mad. 'He will shortly grow,'
he said, 'to be Orlando Furioso, if the bright Angelica persevere
against him a little longer.'

It was all a farce, of course, but underneath the fantastic affectation
there was a very real sentiment, that of the intolerable tedium of
captivity. Raleigh had been living a life of exaggerated activity, never
a month at rest, now at sea, now in Devonshire, now at Court, hurrying
hither and thither, his horse and he one veritable centaur. Among the
Euphuistic 'tears of fancy' which he sent from the Tower, there occurs
this little sentence, breathing the most complete sincerity: 'I live to
trouble you at this time, being become like a fish cast on dry land,
gasping for breath, with lame legs and lamer lungs.' There was no man
then in England whom it was more cruel to shut up in a cage. This
reference to his lungs is the first announcement of the failure of his
health. Raleigh's constitution was tough, but he had a variety of
ailments, and a tendency to rheumatism and to consumption was among
them. In later years we shall find that the damp cells of the Tower
filled his joints with pain, and reduced him with a weakening cough. But
long before his main imprisonment his joints and his lungs were
troublesome to him.

Meanwhile the great privateering expedition in which Raleigh had
launched his fortune was proceeding to its destination in the Azores. No
such enterprise had been as yet undertaken by English adventurers. It
was a strictly private effort, but the Queen in her personal capacity
had contributed two ships and 1,800_l._, and the citizens of London
6,000_l._, but Raleigh retained by far the largest share. Raleigh had
been a week in the Tower, when Admiral Sir John Burrough, who had
divided the fleet and had left Frobisher on the coast of Spain, joined
to his contingent two London ships, the 'Golden Dragon' and the
'Prudence,' and lay in wait under Flores for the great line of
approaching carracks. The largest of these, the 'Madre de Dios,' was the