Never had the living pictures been more startling, the allegories more incomprehensible, the banquets more elaborate, the orations more tedious.

Beside himself with rapture, Leicester almost assumed the God.

In Delft, a city which he described as "another London almost for beauty and fairness," he is said so far to have forgotten himself as to declare that his family had--in the person of Lady Jane Grey, his father, and brother--been unjustly deprived of the crown of England; an indiscretion which caused a shudder in all who heard him.

It was also very dangerous for the Lieutenant-General to exceed the bounds of becoming modesty at that momentous epoch.

His power, as we shall soon have occasion to observe, was anomalous, and he was surrounded by enemies.