per cent. of the sum.  A good number of transports, and scows had been collected, but there had been a deficiency of money for their proper equipment, as the five millions had been very slow in coming, and were still upon the road.  The whole enterprise was on the point of being sacrificed, according to Farnese, for want of funds.  The time for doing the deed had arrived, and he declared himself incapacitated by poverty.  He expressed his disgust and resentment in language more energetic than courtly; and protested that he was not to blame.  “I always thought,” said he bitterly, “that your Majesty would provide all that was necessary even in superfluity, and not limit me beneath the ordinary.  I did not suppose, when it was most important to have ready money, that I should be kept short, and not allowed to draw certain sums by anticipation, which I should have done had you not forbidden.”

This was, through life, a striking characteristic of Philip.  Enormous schemes were laid out with utterly inadequate provision for their accomplishment, and a confident expectation entertained that wild, visions were; in some indefinite way, to be converted into substantial realities, without fatigue or personal exertion on his part, and with a very trifling outlay of ready money.

Meantime the faithful Farnese did his best.  He was indefatigable night and day in getting his boats together and providing his munitions of war.  He dug a canal from Sas de Gand—­which was one of his principal depots—­all the way to Sluys, because the water-communication between those two points was entirely in the hands of the Hollanders and Zeelanders.  The rebel cruisers swarmed in the Scheldt, from, Flushing almost to Antwerp, so that it was quite impossible for Parma’s forces to venture forth at all; and it also seemed hopeless to hazard putting to sea from Sluys.  At the same, time he had appointed his, commissioners to treat with the English envoys already named by the Queen.  There had been much delay in the arrival of those deputies, on account of the noise raised by Barneveld and his followers; but Burghley was now sanguine that the exposure of what he called the Advocate’s seditious, false, and perverse proceedings, would enable Leicester to procure the consent of the States to a universal peace.

And thus, with these parallel schemes of invasion and negotiation, spring; summer, and autumn, had worn away.  Santa Cruz was still with his fleet in Lisbon, Cadiz, and the Azores; and Parma was in Brussels, when Philip fondly imagined him established in Greenwich Palace.  When made aware of his master’s preposterous expectations, Alexander would have been perhaps amused, had he not been half beside himself with indignation.  Such folly seemed incredible.  There was not the slightest appearance of a possibility of making a passage without the protection of the Spanish fleet, he observed.  His vessels were mere transport-boats, without the least power of resisting