cident he well
knew was perfectly adapted to the queen's taste. Another similar
incident, in which I have been anticipated in the disclosure of the
fact, though not of its nature, was what Sir Toby Matthews obscurely
alludes to in his letters, of "the guilty blow he gave himself in the
Tower;" a passage which had long excited my attention, till I discovered
the curious incident in some manuscript letters of Lord Cecil. Rawleigh
was then confined in the Tower for the Cobham conspiracy; a plot so
absurd and obscure that one historian has called it a "state-riddle,"
but for which, so many years after, Rawleigh so cruelly lost his life.

Lord Cecil gives an account of the examination of the prisoners involved
in this conspiracy. "One afternoon, whilst divers of us were in the
Tower examining some of these prisoners, Sir Walter _attempted to murder
himself_; whereof, when we were advertised, we came to him, and found
him in some agony to be unable to endure his misfortunes, and protesting
innocency, with carelessness of life; and in that humour _he had wounded
himself under the right pap, but no way mortally, being in truth rather
a_ CUT _than a_ STAB, and now very well cured both in body and
mind."[69] This feeble attempt at suicide, this "cut rather than stab,"
I must place among those scenes in the life of Rawleigh so
incomprehensible with the genius of the man. If it were nothing but one
of those

Fears of the Brave!

we must now open another of the

Follies of the Wise!

Rawleigh returned from the wild and desperate voyage of Guiana, with
misery in every shape about him.[70] His son had perished; his devoted
Keymis would not survive his reproach; and Rawleigh, without fortune and
without hope, in sickness and in sorrow, brooded over the sad thought,
that in the hatred of the Spaniard, and in the political pusillanimity
of James, he was arriving only to meet inevitable death. With this
presentiment, he had even wished to give up his ship to the crew, had
they consented to land him in France; but he was probably irresolute in
this decision at sea, as he was afterwards at land, where he wished to
escape, and refused to fly: the clearest intellect was darkened, and
magnanimity itself became humiliated, floating between the sense of
honour and of life.

Rawleigh landed in his native county of Devon: his arrival was the
common topic of conversation, and he was the object of censure or of
commiseration: but his per