unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the
stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has
picked from the Emperor's pigeon-holes or the Pope's pocket, and
which not Hatton, nor Buckhurst, nor Leicester, nor the Lord
Treasurer is to see,--nobody but Elizabeth herself; he sits
invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveld
and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast
schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal,
the minutest characteristic of king or minister, chronicled by the
gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty; and after all
this prying and eavesdropping, having seen the cross-purposes, the
bribings, the windings in the dark, he is not surprised if those who
were systematically deceived did not always arrive at correct
conclusions."

The fascination of such a quest is readily conceivable. A drama with
real characters, and the spectator at liberty to go behind the scenes and
look upon and talk with the kings and queens between the acts; to examine
the scenery, to handle the properties, to study the "make up" of the
imposing personages of full-dress histories; to deal with them all as
Thackeray has done with the Grand Monarque in one of his caustic
sketches,--this would be as exciting, one might suppose, as to sit
through a play one knows by heart at Drury Lane or the Theatre Francais,
and might furnish occupation enough to the curious idler who was only in
search of entertainment. The mechanical obstacles of half-illegible
manuscript, of antiquated forms of speech, to say nothing of the
intentional obscurities of diplomatic correspondence, stand, however,
in the way of all but the resolute and unwearied scholar. These
difficulties, in all their complex obstinacy, had been met and overcome
by the heroic efforts, the concentrated devotion, of the new laborer in