faithful subordinates. They cannot say, "Here is the end; this is the
work to be done; upon your shoulders be the burden!" They must "stoop to
conquer." Every miserable detail becomes of moment, until by-and-by the
art of intrigue and conspiracy begins to lose proportion in their minds.
The detail has ever been so important, conspiracy so much second nature,
that they must needs be intriguing and conspiring when the occasion is
trifling and the end negligible.

To all intriguers life has lost romance; there is no poem left in nature;
no ideal, personal, public or national, detains them in its wholesome
influence; no great purpose allures them; they have no causes for which
to die--save themselves. They are so honeycombed with insincerity and
the vice of thought, that by-and-by all colours are as one, all pathways
the same; because, whichever hue of light breaks upon their world they
see it through the grey-cloaked mist of falsehood; and whether the path
be good or bad they would still walk in it crookedly. How many men and
women Leicester had tracked or lured to their doom; over how many men and
women he had stepped to his place of power, history speaks not carefully;
but the traces of his deeds run through a thousand archives, and they
suggest plentiful sacrifices to a subverted character.

Favourite of a Queen, he must now stoop to set a trap for the ruin of
as simple a soul as ever stepped upon the soil of England; and his dark
purposes had not even the excuse of necessity on the one hand, of love or
passion on the other. An insane jealousy of the place the girl had won
in the consideration of the Queen, of her lover who, he thought, had won
a still higher place in the same influence, was his only motive for
action at first. His cruelty was not redeemed even by the sensuous
interest the girl might arouse in a reckless nature by her beauty and her
charm.