the Spanish treasure fleet; but the Queen refused to let him go, and his place was taken by his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, whose heroic combat and death he celebrated in his first important prose work, Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of the Azores, a noble piece of writing, which forms the groundwork of Tennyson's famous ballad. In the following year he invested all the money he could raise in a naval expedition planned for the capture of a great treasureladen Spanish carrack, and was putting to sea at the head of it when he was suddenly ordered to return. His days of favour were over; he had wounded his royal mistress's sense of decorum, and worse, her vanity, by an intrigue with one of her maids of honour, and was detained in prison till near the end of the year, except for a brief liberation that he might use his local influence to prevent the Devonshire people from plundering the carrack, which had been captured without him. Upon his release he married the object of his attachment, Elizabeth

Throgmorton, for whom his affection seems to have been deep and lasting, and settled at Sherborne Castle, spending, however, much time in London in the discharge of his Parliamentary duties and in the intimacy of men of letters and science. He resumed his long poem, Cynthia, the Lady of the Sea, which he must have commenced before receiving from Spenser the title of "The Shepherd of the Ocean." 'The Lady of the Sea" is Elizabeth, and the author probably represented his devout obedience to his mistress under the figure of "the moon-led waters." All is lost except the twenty-first book, which reveals little of the plan of the poem, the allegorical machinery being discarded for direct reference to the poet's offended sovereign, eloquent indeed, but so prolix as almost to justify his naïve apprehension that, instead of softening her heart he will shut her eyes:

Sherborne Castle

From a photograph

Leave them! or lay them up with thy despairs !
She hath resolved and judged thee long ago.
Thy lines are now a murmuring to her ears,
Like to a falling stream, which, passing slow,

Is wont to nourish sleep and quietness;
So shall thy painful labours be perused,
And draw in rest, which sometime had regard;

But those her cares thy errors have excused.

The imperfect rhymes and frequent gaps show that this part of the poem at least had not received Raleigh's final corrections. The earlier cantos were known to many, and their disappearance is extraordinary. Raleigh is almost the only considerable English author who has suffered by the total loss of important