But he did not go about it as a loyal man, to advance the honor of his queen, but his own honor only, dreaming that he too should be a king; and was not ashamed to tell her majesty that he had rather be sovereign of a molehill than the highest subject of an emperor." "They say," said Mr.Leigh, "that he told her plainly he should be a prince before he died, and that she gave him one of her pretty quips in return." "I don't know that her majesty had the best of it.

A fool is many times too strong for a wise man, by virtue of his thick hide.

For when she said that she hoped she should hear from him in his new principality, 'Yes, sooth,' says he, graciously enough.

'And in what style ?' asks she.
'To our dear sister,' says Stukely: to which her clemency had nothing to reply, but turned away, as Mr.Burleigh told me, laughing." "Alas for him!" said gentle Mrs.Leigh.

"Such self-conceit--and Heaven knows we have the root of it in ourselves also--is the very daughter of self-will, and of that loud crying out about I, and me, and mine, which is the very bird-call for all devils, and the broad road which leads to death." "It will lead him to his," said Sir Richard; "God grant it be not upon Tower-hill! for since that Florida plot, and after that his hopes of Irish preferment came to naught, he who could not help himself by fair means has taken to foul ones, and gone over to Italy to the Pope, whose infallibility has not been proof against Stukely's wit; for he was soon his Holiness's closet counsellor, and, they say, his bosom friend; and made him give credit to his boasts that, with three thousand soldiers he would beat the English out of Ireland, and make the Pope's son king of it." "Ay, but," said Mr.Leigh, "I suppose the Italians have the same fetch now as they had when I was there, to explain such ugly cases; namely, that the Pope is infallible only in doctrine, and quoad Pope; while quoad hominem, he is even as others, or indeed, in general, a deal worse, so that the office, and not the man, may be glorified thereby.
But where is Stukely now ?" "At Rome when last I heard of him, ruffling it up and down the Vatican as Baron Ross, Viscount Murrough, Earl Wexford, Marquis Leinster, and a title or two more, which have cost the Pope little, seeing that they never were his to give; and plotting, they say, some hare-brained expedition against Ireland by the help of the Spanish king, which must end in nothing but his shame and ruin.