Immediately thereafter, he was summoned to be a member of the royal household, and was retained about the person of the queen, who condescended to acts of much familiarity, jesting, capping verses, and playing at the court games of the day with him, not a little, it is believed, to the chagrin of the haughty and unworthy favorite, Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

It does not appear, however, that, although she might coquet with Raleigh, to gratify her own love of admiration, and to enjoy the charms of his rich and fiery eloquence and versatile wit, though she might advance him in his career of arms, and even stimulate his vaulting ambition to deeds of yet wilder emprise, she ever esteemed Raleigh as he deserved to be esteemed, or penetrated the depths of his imaginative and creative genius, much less beloved him personally, as she did the vain and petty ambitious Leicester, or the high-spirited, the valorous, the hapless Essex.

Another anecdote is related of this period, which will serve in no small degree to illustrate this trait of Elizabeth’s strangely-mingled nature.  Watching with the ladies of her court, in the gardens of one of her royal residences, as was her jealous and suspicious usage, the movements of her young courtier, when he either believed, or affected to believe himself unobserved, she saw him write a line on a pane of glass in a garden pavilion with a diamond ring, which, on inspecting it subsequently to his departure, she found to read in this wise:—­

  “Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall—­”

the sentence, or the distich rather, being thus left unfinished, when, with her royal hand, she added the second line—­no slight encouragement to so keen and fiery a temperament as that of him for whom she wrote, when given him from such a source—­

  “If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all.”

But his heart never failed him—­not in the desperate strife with the Invincible Armada—­not when he discovered and won for the English crown the wild shores of the tropical Guiana—­not when he sailed the first far up the mighty Orinoco—­not when, in after days, he stormed Cadiz, outdoing even the daring deeds of emulous and glorious—­not when the favor of Elizabeth was forfeited—­not in the long years of irksome, solitary, heart-breaking imprisonment, endured at the hands of that base, soulless despot, the first James of England—­not at his parting from his beloved and lovely wife—­not on the scaffold, where he died as he had lived, a dauntless, chivalrous, high-minded English gentleman.

The greatest error of his life was his pertinacious hostility to Essex, originating in the jealousy of that brave, but rash and headstrong leader, who disgraced and suspended him after the taking of Fayal, a circumstance which he never forgave or forgot—­an error which ultimately cost him his own life, since it alienated from him the affections of the English people, and rendered them pitiless to him in his own extremity.