reme dislike to any manifestations of a mercenary disposition in her
servants, had been disgusted by the frequency and earnestness of his
petitions for pecuniary favors. "When, sir Walter," she had once
exclaimed, "will you cease to be a beggar?" He replied, "When your
gracious majesty ceases to be a benefactor." So dexterous an answer
appeased her for a time; and the profusion of eloquent adulation with
which he never failed to soothe her ear, engaged her self-love strongly
in his behalf. But to complete the ill-fortune of Raleigh, father
Parsons, provoked by the earnestness with which he had urged in
parliament the granting of supplies for a war offensive and defensive
against Spain, had published a pamphlet charging him with atheism and
impiety, which had not only found welcome reception with his enemies,
but with the people, to whom he was ever obnoxious, and had even raised
a prejudice against him in the mind of his sovereign. On this subject, a
writer contemporary with the later years of Raleigh thus expresses
himself:

"Sir Walter Raleigh was the first, as I have heard, that ventured to
tack about and sail aloof from the beaten track of the schools; who,
upon the discovery of so apparent an error as a torrid zone, intended to
proceed in an inquisition after more solid truths; till the mediation of
some whose livelihood lay in hammering shrines for this superannuated
study, possessed queen Elizabeth that such doctrine was against God no
less than her father's honor; whose faith, if he owed any, was grounded
upon school divinity. Whereupon she chid him, who was, by his own
confession, ever after branded with the name of an atheist, though a
known assertor of God and providence[115]."

[Note 115: Osborne's "Introduction" to his Essays.]

The business of Mrs. Throgmorton, and the disputes arising out of the
sale of the captured carrack, succeeded, to inflame still more the
ill-humour of the queen; and Raleigh, finding every thing adverse to him
at court, resolved to quit the scene for a time, in the hope of
returning with better omens, when absence and dangers should again have
endeared him to his offended mistress, and when the splendor of his
foreign successes might enable him to impose silence on the clamors of
malignity at home.

The interior of the pathless wilds of Guiana had been reported to abound
in those exhaustless mines of the precious metals which filled the
imaginations of the earliest explorers of