promptness and efficiency with which he had brought his fleet to the
place of rendezvous, and now all was bustle and preparation in the
English ports for the exciting expedition resolved upon. Never during
Philip's life-time, nor for several years before his birth, had a hostile
foot trod the soil of Spain, except during the brief landing at Corunna
in 1590, and, although the king's beard had been well singed ten years
previously by Sir Francis Drake, and although the coast of Portugal had
still more recently been invaded by Essex and Vere, yet the present
adventure was on a larger scale, and held out brighter prospects of
success than any preceding expedition had done. In an age when the line
between the land and sea service, between regular campaigners and
volunteers, between public and private warfare, between chivalrous
knights-errant and buccaneers, was not very distinctly drawn, there could
be nothing more exciting to adventurous spirits, more tempting to the
imagination of those who hated the Pope and Philip, who loved fighting,
prize-money, and the queen, than a foray into Spain.

It was time to return the visit of the Armada. Some of the sea-kings
were gone. Those magnificent freebooters, Drake and Hawkins, had just
died in the West Indies, and doughty Sir Roger Williams had left the
world in which he had bustled so effectively, bequeathing to posterity a
classic memorial of near a half century of hard fighting, written, one
might almost imagine, in his demi-pique saddle. But that most genial,
valiant, impracticable, reckless, fascinating hero of romance, the Earl
of Essex--still a youth although a veteran in service--was in the spring-
tide of favour and glory, and was to command the land-forces now
assembled at Plymouth. That other "corsair"--as the Spaniards called
him--that other charming and heroic shape in England's chequered
chronicle of chivalry and crime--famous in arts and arms, politics,
science, literature, endowed with so many of the gifts by which men