Since the present article was written, a letter, hitherto unpublished, appears in the recent edition of Shakspeare which curiously and minutely records one of those artifices of the kind which I am about to narrate at length. When, under Elizabeth, Rawleigh was once in confinement, it appears that seeing the queen passing by, he was suddenly seized with a strange resolution of combating with the governor and his people, declaring that the mere _sight_ of the queen had made him desperate, as a confined lover would feel at the sight of his mistress. The letter gives a minute narrative of Sir Walter's astonishing conduct, and carefully repeats the warm romantic style in which he talked of his royal mistress, and his formal resolution to die rather than exist out of her presence.[68] This extravagant scene, with all its cunning, has been most elaborately penned by the ingenious letter-writer, with a hint to the person whom he addresses, to suffer it to meet the eye of their royal mistress, who could not fail of admiring our new "Orlando Furioso," and soon after released this tender prisoner! To me it is evident that the whole scene was got up and concerted for the occasion, and was the invention of Rawleigh himself; the romantic incident he well knew was perfectly adapted to the queen's taste. Another similar incident, in which I have been anticipated in the disclosure of the fact, though not of its nature, was what Sir Toby Matthews obscurely alludes to in his letters, of "the guilty blow he gave himself in the Tower;" a passage which had long excited my attention, till I discovered the curious incident in some manuscript letters of Lord Cecil. Rawleigh was then confined in the Tower for the Cobham conspiracy; a plot so absurd and obscure that one historian has called it a "state-riddle," but for which, so many years after, Rawleigh so cruelly lost his life. Lord Cecil gives an account of the examination of the prisoners involved in this conspiracy. "One afternoon, whilst divers of us were in the Tower examining some of these prisoners, Sir Walter _attempted to murder himself_; whereof, when we were advertised, we came to him, and found him in some agony to be unable to endure his misfortunes, and protesting innocency, with carelessness of life; and in that humour _he had wounded himself under the right pap, but no way mortally, being in truth rather a_ CUT _than a_ STAB, and now very well cured both in body and mind."[69] This feeble attempt at suicide, this "cut rather than stab," I must place among those scenes in the life of Rawleigh so incomprehensible with the genius of the man. If it were nothing but one of those Fears of the Brave! we must now open another of the Follies of the Wise!