But his greatest crime, in the eyes of Elizabeth, the crime which lost him her good graces for ever, and neutralized all his services on the flood and in the field, rendering ineffective even the strange letter which he addressed to his friend, Sir Robert Cecil, and which was doubtless shown to the queen, although it failed to move her implacable and iron heart, was his marriage, early in life, to the beautiful and charming Elizabeth Throgmorton.  The letter to which I have alluded is so curious that I cannot refrain from quoting it entire, as a most singular illustration of the habits of that age of chivalry, and of the character of that strange compound, Elizabeth, who, to the “heart of a man, and that man a king of England,” to quote her own eloquent and noble diction, added the vanity and conceit of the weakest and most frivolous of womankind, and who, at the age of sixty years, chose to be addressed as a Diana and a Venus, a nymph, a goddess, and an angel.

“My heart,” he wrote, “was never till this day, that I hear the queen goes away so far off, whom I have followed so many years, with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind here, in a dark prison all alone.  While she was yet near at hand, that I might hear of her once in two or three days, my sorrows were the less; but even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery.  I, that was wont to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph, sometimes sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometimes singing like an angel, sometimes playing like Orpheus.  Behold the sorrow of this world!  Once a miss has bereaved me of all.  Oh! glory, that only shineth in misfortune, what is become of thy assurance?  All wounds have scars but that of fantasy:  all affections their relentings but that of womankind.  Who is the judge of friendship but adversity? or when is grace witnessed but in offences?  There was no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal.  All those times past, the loves, the sighs, the sorrows, the desires, cannot they weigh down one frail misfortune?  Cannot one drop of gall be his in so great heaps of sweetness?  I may then conclude, ’spes et fortuna valete;’ she is gone in whom I trusted, and of me hath not one thought of mercy, nor any respect of that which was.  Do with me now, therefore, what you list.  I am more weary of life than they are desirous that I should perish; which, if it had been for her, as it is by her, I had been too happily born.”

It is singular enough that such a letter should have been written, under any circumstances, by a middle-aged courtier to an aged queen; but it becomes far more remarkable and extraordinary when we know that the life of Raleigh was not so much as threatened at the time when he wrote; and, so far had either of the parties ever been from entertaining any such affection