She added that in a pamphlet, ascribed to the Archbishop of Milan, just published, she had been accused of ingratitude to the King of Spain, and of plots to take the life of Alexander Farnese.  In answer to the first charge, she willingly acknowledged her obligations to the King of Spain during the reign of her sister.  She pronounced it, however, an absolute falsehood that he had ever saved her life, as if she had ever been condemned to death.  She likewise denied earnestly the charge regarding the Prince of Parma.  She protested herself incapable of such a crime, besides declaring that he had never given her offence.  On the contrary, he was a man whom she had ever honoured for the rare qualities that she had noted in him, and for which he had deservedly acquired a high reputation.

Such, in brief analysis, was the memorable Declaration of Elizabeth in favour of the Netherlands—­a document which was a hardly disguised proclamation of war against Philip.  In no age of the world could an unequivocal agreement to assist rebellious subjects, with men and money, against their sovereign, be considered otherwise than as a hostile demonstration.  The King of Spain so regarded the movement, and forthwith issued a decree, ordering the seizure of all English as well as all Netherland vessels within his ports, together with the arrest of persons, and confiscation of property.

Subsequently to the publication of the Queen’s memorial, and before the departure of the Earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, having received his appointment, together with the rank of general of cavalry, arrived in the Isle of Walcheren, as governor of Flushing, at the head of a portion of the English contingent.

It is impossible not to contemplate with affection so radiant a figure, shining through the cold mists of that Zeeland winter, and that distant and disastrous epoch.  There is hardly a character in history upon which the imagination can dwell with more unalloyed delight.  Not in romantic fiction was there ever created a more attractive incarnation of martial valour, poetic genius, and purity of heart.  If the mocking spirit of the soldier of Lepanto could “smile chivalry away,” the name alone of his English contemporary is potent enough to conjure it back again, so long as humanity is alive to the nobler impulses.

“I cannot pass him over in silence,” says a dusty chronicler, “that glorious star, that lively pattern of virtue, and the lovely joy of all the learned sort.  It was God’s will that he should be born into the world, even to show unto our age a sample of ancient virtue.”  The descendant of an ancient Norman race, and allied to many of the proudest nobles in England, Sidney himself was but a commoner, a private individual, a soldier of fortune.  He was now in his thirty second year, and should have been foremost among the states men of Elizabeth, had it not been, according to Lord Bacon, a maxim of the Cecils, that “able men should