The excellent Doctor had not even yet discovered that the King’s commissioners were delighted with his postulates; and that to have kept them postulating thus five months in succession, while naval and military preparations were slowly bringing forth a great event—­which was soon to strike them with as much amazement as if the moon had fallen out of heaven—­was one of the most decisive triumphs ever achieved by Spanish diplomacy.  But the Doctor thought that his logic had driven the King of Spain to despair.

At the same time he was not insensible to the merits of another and more peremptory style of rhetoric,—­“I pray you,” said he to Walsingham, “let us hear some arguments from my Lord Harry out of her Majesty’s navy now and then.  I think they will do more good than any bolt that we can shoot here.  If they be met with at their going out, there is no possibility for them to make any resistance, having so few men that can abide the sea; for the rest, as you know, must be sea-sick at first.”

But the envoys were completely puzzled.  Even at the beginning of July, Sir James Croft was quite convinced of the innocence of the King and the Duke; but Croft was in his dotage.  As for Dale, he occasionally opened his eyes, and his ears, but more commonly kept them well closed to the significance of passing events; and consoled himself with his protocols and his classics, and the purity of his own Latin.

“’Tis a very wise saying of Terence,” said he, “omnibus nobis ut res dant sese; ita magni aut humiles sumus.’  When the King’s commissioners hear of the King’s navy from Spain, they are in such jollity that they talk loud. . . .  In the mean time—­as the wife of Bath sath in Chaucer by her husband, we owe them not a word.  If we should die tomorrow; I hope her Majesty will find by our writings that the honour of the cause, in the opinion of the world, must be with her Majesty; and that her commissioners are, neither of such imperfection in their reasons, or so barbarous in language, as they who fail not, almost in every line, of some barbarism not to be borne in a grammar-school, although in subtleness and impudent affirming of untruths and denying of truths, her commissioners are not in any respect to match with Champagny and Richardot, who are doctors in that faculty.”

It might perhaps prove a matter of indifference to Elizabeth and to England, when the Queen should be a state-prisoner in Spain and the Inquisition quietly established in her kingdom, whether the world should admit or not, in case of his decease, the superiority of Dr. Dale’s logic and latin to those of his antagonists.  And even if mankind conceded the best of the argument to the English diplomatists, that diplomacy might seem worthless which could be blind to the colossal falsehoods growing daily before its eyes.  Had the commissioners been able to read the secret correspondence between Parma and his master—­as we have had the opportunity of doing—­they