ssioners hear of
the King's navy from Spain, they are in such jollity that they talk loud.
. . . In the mean time--as the wife of Bath sath in Chaucer by her
husband, we owe them not a word. If we should die tomorrow; I hope her
Majesty will find by our writings that the honour of the cause, in the
opinion of the world, must be with her Majesty; and that her
commissioners are, neither of such imperfection in their reasons, or so
barbarous in language, as they who fail not, almost in every line, of
some barbarism not to be borne in a grammar-school, although in
subtleness and impudent affirming of untruths and denying of truths, her
commissioners are not in any respect to match with Champagny and
Richardot, who are doctors in that faculty."

It might perhaps prove a matter of indifference to Elizabeth and to
England, when the Queen should be a state-prisoner in Spain and the
Inquisition quietly established in her kingdom, whether the world should
admit or not, in case of his decease, the superiority of Dr. Dale's logic
and latin to those of his antagonists. And even if mankind conceded the
best of the argument to the English diplomatists, that diplomacy might
seem worthless which could be blind to the colossal falsehoods growing
daily before its eyes. Had the commissioners been able to read the secret
correspondence between Parma and his master--as we have had the
opportunity of doing--they would certainly not have left their homes in
February, to be made fools of until July; but would, on their knees, have
implored their royal mistress to awake from her fatal delusion before it
should be too late. Even without that advantage, it seems incredible that
they should have been unable to pierce through the atmosphere of
duplicity which surrounded them, and to obtain one clear glimpse of the
destruction so, steadily advancing upon England.

For the famous bull of Sixtus V. had now been fulminated. Elizabeth had
bean again denounced as a bastard and usurper, and her kingdom had been
solemnly conferred upon Philip, with title of defender of the Christian,
faith, to have and to hold as tributary and feudatory of Rome. The
so-called Queen had usurped the crown contrary to the ancient treaties
between the apostolic stool and the kingdom of England, which country, on
its reconciliation with the head of the church after the death of St.
Thomas of Canterbury, had recognised the necessity of the Pope's consent
in the succession to its