the French coast. The wind was however so light; that the
whole day was spent before Seymour with his ships could cross the
channel. At last, towards seven in the evening; he saw the great Spanish
Armada, drawn up in a half-moon, and riding at anchor--the ships very
near each other--a little to the eastward of Calais, and very near the
shore. The English, under Howard Drake, Frobisher, and Hawkins, were
slowly following, and--so soon as Lord Henry, arriving from the opposite
shore; had made his junction with them--the whole combined fleet dropped
anchor likewise very near Calais, and within one mile and a half of the
Spaniards. That invincible force had at last almost reached its
destination. It was now to receive the cooperation of the great Farnese,
at the head of an army of veterans, disciplined on a hundred
battle-fields, confident from countless victories, and arrayed, as they
had been with ostentatious splendour, to follow the most brilliant
general in Christendom on his triumphal march into the capital of
England. The long-threatened invasion was no longer an idle figment of
politicians, maliciously spread abroad to poison men's minds as to the
intentions of a long-enduring but magnanimous, and on the whole friendly
sovereign. The mask had been at last thrown down, and the mild accents of
Philip's diplomatists and their English dupes, interchanging protocols so
decorously month after month on the sands of Bourbourg, had been drowned
by the peremptory voice of English and Spanish artillery, suddenly
breaking in upon their placid conferences. It had now become
supererogatory to ask for Alexander's word of honour whether he had, ever
heard of Cardinal Allan's pamphlet, or whether his master contemplated
hostilities against Queen Elizabeth.

Never, since England was England, had such a sight been seen as now
revealed itself in those narrow straits between Dover and Calais. Along
that long, low, sandy shore, and quite within the range of the Calais
fortifications, one hundred and thirty Spanish ships--the greater number
of them the largest and most heavily armed in the world lay face to face,
and scarcely out of cannon-shot, with one hundred and fifty English
sloops and frigates, the strongest and swiftest that the island could
furnish, and commanded by men whose exploits had rung through the world.

Farther along the coast, invisible, but known to be performing a post
perilous and vital service, was a squadron of Du