y manned and ready at the stairs. Repulsed by
the gentlemen pensioners, and refused access to her majesty until after her
return from the excursion, the young esquire stood aloof, to observe the
passing of the pageant; and, seeing the queen pause and hesitate on the
brink of a pool of rain-water which intersected her path, no convenience
being at hand wherewith to bridge it, took off his crimson cloak,
handsomely laid down with gold lace, his only courtlike garment, fell on
one knee, and with doffed cap and downcast eyes threw it over the puddle,
so that the queen passed across dry shod, and swore by God's life, her
favorite oath, that there was chivalry and manhood still in England.

Immediately thereafter, he was summoned to be a member of the royal
household, and was retained about the person of the queen, who condescended
to acts of much familiarity, jesting, capping verses, and playing at the
court games of the day with him, not a little, it is believed, to the
chagrin of the haughty and unworthy favorite, Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

It does not appear, however, that, although she might coquet with Raleigh,
to gratify her own love of admiration, and to enjoy the charms of his rich
and fiery eloquence and versatile wit, though she might advance him in his
career of arms, and even stimulate his vaulting ambition to deeds of yet
wilder emprise, she ever esteemed Raleigh as he deserved to be esteemed, or
penetrated the depths of his imaginative and creative genius, much less
beloved him personally, as she did the vain and petty ambitious Leicester,
or the high-spirited, the valorous, the hapless Essex.

Another anecdote is related of this period, which will serve in no small
degree to illustrate this trait of Elizabeth's strangely-mingled nature.
Watching with the ladies of her court, in the gardens of one of her royal
residences, as was her jealous and suspicious usage, the movements of her
young courtier, when he either believed, or affected to believe himself
unobserved, she saw him write a line on a pane of glass in a garden
pavilion with a diamond ring, which, on inspecting it subsequently to his
departure, she found to read in this wise:--

"Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall--"

the sentence, or the distich rather, being thus left unfinished, when, with
her royal hand, she added the second line--no slight encouragement to so
keen and fiery a temperament as that of him for whom she wrote, when given