William Cecil had an absolute mastery over every detail; he possessed a genius for arrangement. Nothing escaped his notice. He was a kind of machine which attracted all the wild impulses of the time; they passed into the machine's mouth disordered, unarranged; and they passed out shaped, controlled by his slow inevitable will. As a statesman he appears hardly human in his freedom from all personality; he seems a mask hiding the brain of England, and regulating it to the only end where success could be. Men rose to fame fiercely struggling, and did brilliant acts or mad acts, and sank again or settled as the case might be; but always at the supreme head, always alert, always careful, impassive as some Eastern Buddha, sat the Lord Burghley, managing the affairs of the state, managing even the state's impulsive, whimsical mistress. His impassivity afflicted her at times, so that she played pranks on him, vainly endeavouring to upset his restraint and his dignity; but her pranks were hardly heeded. He was English to the solid backbone, and resisted unequivocally the rage of fashion that went out towards all that was foreign; and yet his foreign policy was unswerving and level-headed; he looked upon war as the last terrible resource of state-craft, in an age in which fighting was regarded as the highroad to glory, and was loved for its own wild sake. Elizabeth showed her knowledge of the right word when she called him her "spirit" and her "oracle"; and the courtiers their discernment of the obvious, when they called him "old fox." Together the two names describe him with some accuracy. At his right hand worked Sir Francis Walsingham, who was more astute, but lacked Burghley's greatness of mind. Walsingham was an admirable servant: he would never have been successful under the full weight of responsibility. It was he who developed the system of espionage through every country in Europe, and brought it to an uncanny perfection. That system of secret messages was typical of the day; it was so easy to keep facts hidden, and to pervert them advantageously when news travelled so slowly, that it was a necessity to have reliable men on every spot to check statements and to watch events and tendencies. When Walsingham died in 1590, Burghley showed his indomitable energy by mastering the intricate cyphers and details connected with the business; he was then at the good age of seventy. [Illustration: WILLIAM CECIL, LORD BURGHLEY] As his health failed, his son, Robert Cecil, took more and more of his great father's responsibilities upon himself; and "The Little Secretary," as the queen called him, became gradually the most important man in the realm. He was craftier than his father, and more adaptable, but he never rose to the greatness of Lord Burghley. His figure is not so imposing; there was something under-hand about his conduct, which does not appear in the slow, diplomatic wisdom of the older man.