for them to make any resistance, having so few men that can abide the
sea; for the rest, as you know, must be sea-sick at first."

But the envoys were completely puzzled. Even at the beginning of July,
Sir James Croft was quite convinced of the innocence of the King and the
Duke; but Croft was in his dotage. As for Dale, he occasionally opened
his eyes, and his ears, but more commonly kept them well closed to the
significance of passing events; and consoled himself with his protocols
and his classics, and the purity of his own Latin.

"'Tis a very wise saying of Terence," said he, "omnibus nobis ut res dant
sese; ita magni aut humiles sumus.' When the King's commissioners hear
of the King's navy from Spain, they are in such jollity that they talk
loud . . . . . In the mean time--as the wife of Bath sath in Chaucer
by her husband, we owe them not a word. If we should die tomorrow;
I hope her Majesty will find by our writings that the honour of the
cause, in the opinion of the world, must be with her Majesty; and that
her commissioners are, neither of such imperfection in their reasons,
or so barbarous in language, as they who fail not, almost in every line,
of some barbarism not to be borne in a grammar-school, although in
subtleness and impudent affirming of untruths and denying of truths, her
commissioners are not in any respect to match with Champagny and
Richardot, who are doctors in that faculty."

It might perhaps prove a matter of indifference to Elizabeth and to
England, when the Queen should be a state-prisoner in Spain and the
Inquisition quietly established in her kingdom, whether the world should
admit or not, in case of his decease, the superiority of Dr. Dale's logic
and latin to those of his antagonists. And even if mankind conceded the
best of the argument to the English diplomatists, that diplomacy might