Meanwhile Leicester had reached Harwich, but the post "bestowed on him," contained, as usual, but cold comfort.

He was resolved, however, to go manfully forward, and do the work before him, until the enterprise should prove wholly impracticable.

It is by the light afforded by the secret never-published correspondence of the period with which we are now occupied, that the true characteristics of Elizabeth, the Earl of Leicester, and other prominent personages, must be scanned, and the study is most important, for it was by those characteristics, in combination with other human elements embodied in distant parts of Christendom, that the destiny of the world was determined.

In that age, more than in our own perhaps, the influence of the individual was widely and intensely felt.

Historical chymistry is only rendered possible by a detection of the subtle emanations, which it was supposed would for ever elude analysis, but which survive in those secret, frequently ciphered intercommunications.
Philip II., William of Orange, Queen Elizabeth, Alexander Farnese, Robert Dudley, never dreamed--when disclosing their inmost thoughts to their trusted friends at momentous epochs--that the day would come on earth when those secrets would be no longer hid from the patient enquirer after truth.