ce of
Hawkins with the Queen of Scots and King Philip; or this amazing
performance of Sir Francis Drake in a vessel no larger than a
second-rate yacht of a modern noble lord?

Resolution, daring, professional skill, all historians allow to these
men; but, like Burghley, they regard what they did as piracy, not much
better, if at all better, than the later exploits of Morgan and Kidd. So
cried the Catholics who wished Elizabeth's ruin; so cried Lope de Vega
and King Philip. In milder language the modern philosopher repeats the
unfavourable verdict, rejoices that he lives in an age when such doings
are impossible, and apologises faintly for the excesses of an imperfect
age. May I remind the philosopher that we live in an age when other
things have also happily become impossible, and that if he and his
friends were liable when they went abroad for their summer tours to be
snapped by the familiars of the Inquisition, whipped, burnt alive, or
sent to the galleys, he would perhaps think more leniently of any
measures by which that respectable institution and its masters might be
induced to treat philosophers with greater consideration?

Again, remember Dr. Johnson's warning, Beware of cant. In that intensely
serious century men were more occupied with the realities than the forms
of things. By encouraging rebellion in England and Ireland, by burning
so many scores of poor English seamen and merchants in fools' coats at
Seville, the King of Spain had given Elizabeth a hundred occasions for
declaring war against him. Situated as she was, with so many disaffected
Catholic subjects, she could not _begin_ a war on such a quarrel. She
had to use such resources as she had, and of these resources the best
was a splendid race of men who were not afraid to do for her at their
own risk what commissioned officers would and might have justly done had
formal war been declared, men who defeated the national enemy with
materials conquered from himself, who were devoted enough to dispense
with the personal security which the sovereign's commission would have
extended to prisoners of war, and face the certainty of being hanged if
they were taken. Yes; no doubt by the letter of the law of nations Drake
and Hawkins were corsairs of the same stuff as Ulysses, as the rovers of
Norway. But the common-sense of Europe saw through the form to the
substance which lay below it, and the instinct of their countrymen gave
them a place among the fighting h