him from such a source--

"If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all."

But his heart never failed him--not in the desperate strife with the
Invincible Armada--not when he discovered and won for the English crown the
wild shores of the tropical Guiana--not when he sailed the first far up the
mighty Orinoco--not when, in after days, he stormed Cadiz, outdoing even
the daring deeds of emulous and glorious--not when the favor of Elizabeth
was forfeited--not in the long years of irksome, solitary, heart-breaking
imprisonment, endured at the hands of that base, soulless despot, the first
James of England--not at his parting from his beloved and lovely wife--not
on the scaffold, where he died as he had lived, a dauntless, chivalrous,
high-minded English gentleman.

The greatest error of his life was his pertinacious hostility to Essex,
originating in the jealousy of that brave, but rash and headstrong leader,
who disgraced and suspended him after the taking of Fayal, a circumstance
which he never forgave or forgot--an error which ultimately cost him his
own life, since it alienated from him the affections of the English people,
and rendered them pitiless to him in his own extremity.

But his greatest crime, in the eyes of Elizabeth, the crime which lost him
her good graces for ever, and neutralized all his services on the flood and
in the field, rendering ineffective even the strange letter which he
addressed to his friend, Sir Robert Cecil, and which was doubtless shown to
the queen, although it failed to move her implacable and iron heart, was
his marriage, early in life, to the beautiful and charming Elizabeth
Throgmorton. The letter to which I have alluded is so curious that I cannot
refrain from quoting it entire, as a most singular illustration of the
habits of that age of chivalry, and of the character of that strange
compound, Elizabeth, who, to the "heart of a man, and that man a king of
England," to quote her own eloquent and noble diction, added the vanity and
conceit of the weakest and most frivolous of womankind, and who, at the age
of sixty years, chose to be addressed as a Diana and a Venus, a nymph, a
goddess, and an angel.

"My heart," he wrote, "was never till this day, that I hear the queen
goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years, with so great
love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind here, in a
dark prison all alone. While she was yet near at han