glorious. At home are Jesuits plotting; dark, crooked-pathed, going
up and down in all manner of disguises, doing the devil's work if men
ever did it; trying to sow discord between man and man, class and
class; putting out books full of filthy calumnies, declaring the
queen illegitimate, excommunicate, a usurper; English law null, and
all state appointments void, by virtue of a certain 'Bull'; and
calling on the subjects to rebellion and assassination, even on the
bedchamber--woman to do to her 'as Judith did to Holofernes.' She
answers by calm contempt. Now and then Burleigh and Walsingham catch
some of the rogues, and they meet their deserts; but she for the most
part lets them have their way. God is on her side, and she will not
fear what man can do to her.

Abroad, the sky is dark and wild, and yet full of fantastic
splendour. Spain stands strong and awful, a rising world-tyranny,
with its dark-souled Cortezes and Pizarros, Alvas, Don Johns, and
Parmas, men whose path is like the lava stream; who go forth slaying
and to slay, in the name of their gods, like those old Assyrian
conquerors on the walls of Nineveh, with tutelary genii flying above
their heads, mingled with the eagles who trail the entrails of the
slain. By conquest, intermarriage, or intrigue, she has made all the
southern nations her vassals or her tools; close to our own shores,
the Netherlands are struggling vainly for their liberties; abroad,
the Western Islands, and the whole trade of Africa and India, will in
a few years be hers. And already the Pope, whose 'most Catholic' and
faithful servant she is, has repaid her services in the cause of
darkness by the gift of the whole New World--a gift which she has
claimed by cruelties and massacres unexampled since the days of
Timour and Zinghis Khan. There she spreads and spreads, as Drake
found her picture in the Government House at St. Domingo, the horse