ever were beheld.' The Deputy took
all the responsibility and expected no blame; he received none. In reply
to his report, Elizabeth assured him a month later that 'this late
enterprise had been performed by him greatly to her liking.' It is
useless to expatiate on a code of morals that seems to us positively
Japanese. To Lord Grey and the rest the rebellious kerns and their
Southern allies were enemies of God and the Queen, beyond the scope of
mercy in this world or the next, and no more to be spared or paltered
with than malignant vermin. In his inexperience, Raleigh, to be soon
ripened by knowledge of life and man, agreed with this view, but,
happily for Ireland and England too, there were others who declined to
sink, as Mr. Froude says, 'to the level of the Catholic continental
tyrannies.' At Ormond's instigation the Queen sent over in April 1581 a
general pardon.

Severe as Lord Grey was, he seemed too lenient to Raleigh. In January
1581, the young captain left Cork and made the perilous journey to
Dublin to expostulate with the Deputy, and to urge him to treat with
greater stringency various Munster chieftains who were blowing the
embers of the rebellion into fresh flame. Among these malcontents the
worst was a certain David Barry, son of Lord Barry, himself a prisoner
in Dublin Castle. David Barry had placed the family stronghold, Barry
Court, at the disposal of the Geraldines. Raleigh obtained permission to
seize and hold this property, and returned from Dublin to carry out his
duty. On his way back, as he was approaching Barry's country, with his
men straggling behind him, the Seneschal of Imokelly, the strongest and
craftiest of the remaining Geraldines, laid an ambush to seize him at
the ford of Corabby. Raleigh not only escaped himself, but returned in
the face of a force which was to his as twenty to one, in order to
rescue a comrade whose horse had thrown him in the river. With a
quarter-staff in one hand and a pistol in the other, he held the
Seneschal and his kerns at bay, and brought his little body of troops
through the ambush without the loss of one man. In the dreary monotony
of the war, this brilliant act of courage, of which Raleigh himself in a
letter gives a very modest account, touched the popular heart, and did
as much as anything to make him famous.

The existing documents which illustrate Raleigh's life in Ireland during
1581, and they are somewhat numerous, give the student a much higher