It was time to return the visit of the Armada.  Some of the sea-kings were gone.  Those magnificent freebooters, Drake and Hawkins, had just died in the West Indies, and doughty Sir Roger Williams had left the world in which he had bustled so effectively, bequeathing to posterity a classic memorial of near a half century of hard fighting, written, one might almost imagine, in his demi-pique saddle.  But that most genial, valiant, impracticable, reckless, fascinating hero of romance, the Earl of Essex—­still a youth although a veteran in service—­was in the spring-tide of favour and glory, and was to command the land-forces now assembled at Plymouth.  That other “corsair”—­as the Spaniards called him—­that other charming and heroic shape in England’s chequered chronicle of chivalry and crime—­famous in arts and arms, politics, science, literature, endowed with so many of the gifts by which men confer lustre on their age and country, whose name was already a part of England’s eternal glory, whose tragic destiny was to be her undying shame—­Raleigh, the soldier, sailor, scholar, statesman, poet, historian, geographical discoverer, planter of empires yet unborn—­was also present, helping to organize the somewhat chaotic elements of which the chief Anglo-Dutch enterprise for this year against—­the Spanish world-dominion was compounded.

And, again, it is not superfluous to recal the comparatively slender materials, both in bulk and numbers, over which the vivid intelligence and restless energy of the two leading Protestant powers, the Kingdom and the Republic, disposed.  Their contest against the overshadowing empire, which was so obstinately striving to become the fifth-monarchy of history, was waged by land:  and naval forces, which in their aggregate numbers would scarce make a startling list of killed and wounded in a single modern battle; by ships such that a whole fleet of them might be swept out of existence with half-a-dozen modern broadsides; by weapons which would seem to modern eyes like clumsy toys for children.  Such was the machinery by which the world was to be lost and won, less than three centuries ago.  Could science; which even in that age had made gigantic strides out of the preceding darkness, have revealed its later miracles, and have presented its terrible powers to the despotism which was seeking to crush all Christendom beneath its feet, the possible result might have been most tragical to humanity.  While there are few inventions in morals, the demon Intellect is ever at his work, knowing no fatigue and scorning contentment in his restless demands upon the infinite Unknown.  Yet moral truth remains unchanged, gradually through the ages extending its influence, and it is only by conformity to its simple and, eternal dictates that nations, like individuals, can preserve a healthful existence.  In the unending warfare between right and wrong, between liberty and despotism; Evil has the advantage of rapidly assuming many shapes.  It has been well said that