any one on the face of the earth,' is a speech which may prove
Raleigh to have been a fool, and we must understand it before we can
say that it proves him a rogue. If we had received such a letter
from a friend, we should have said at once, 'Why the man, in his
hurry and confusion, has omitted THE word; he must have meant to
write, not "There is none on the face of the earth that I would be
fastened to," but "There is none on the face of the earth that I
would RATHER be fastened to,"' which would at once make sense and
suit fact. For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton forthwith,
but made her the best of husbands. My conjectural emendation may go
for what it is worth: but that the passage, as it stands in Murdin's
State Papers (the MSS. I have not seen) is either misquoted, or mis-
written by Raleigh himself, I cannot doubt. He was not one to think
nonsense, even if he scribbled it.

The Spanish raid turns out well. Raleigh overlooks Elizabeth's
letters of recall till he finds out that the King of Spain has
stopped the Plate-fleet for fear of his coming; and then returns,
sending on Sir John Burrough to the Azores, where he takes the 'Great
Carack,' the largest prize (1600 tons) which had ever been brought
into England. The details of that gallant fight stand in the pages
of Hakluyt. It raised Raleigh once more to wealth, though not to
favour. Shortly after he returns from the sea, he finds himself,
where he deserves to be, in the Tower, where he does more than one
thing which brought him no credit. How far we are justified in
calling his quarrel with Sir George Carew, his keeper, for not
letting him 'disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease
his mind but with a sight of the Queen, or his heart would break,'
hypocrisy, is a very different matter. Honest Arthur Gorges, a
staunch friend of Raleigh's, tells the story laughingly and lovingly,