That wild thoughts of such a deed may have crossed his mind, may have been a terrible temptation to him, may even have broken out in hasty words, one does not deny. He himself says that he spoke of such a thing ‘to keep his men together.’ All depends on how the words were spoken. The form of the sentence, the tone of voice, is everything. Who could blame him, if seeing some of the captains whom he had most trusted deserting him, his men heaping him with every slander, and, as he solemnly swore on the scaffold, calling witnesses thereto by name, forcing him to take an oath that he would not return to England before they would have him, and locking him into his own cabin—who could blame him, I ask, for saying in that daring off-hand way of his, which has so often before got him into trouble, ‘Come, my lads, do not despair. If the worst comes to the worst, there is the Plate-fleet to fall back upon’? When I remember, too, that the taking of the said Plate-fleet was in Raleigh’s eyes an altogether just thing; and that he knew perfectly that if he succeeded therein he would be backed by the public opinion of all England, and probably buy his pardon of James, who, if he loved Spain well, loved money better; my surprise rather is, that he did not go and do it. As for any meeting of captains in his cabin and serious proposal of such a plan, I believe it to be simply one of the innumerable lies which James inserted in his ‘Declaration,’ gathered from the tales of men who, fearing (and reasonably) lest their heads should follow Raleigh’s, tried to curry favour by slandering him. This ‘Declaration’ has been so often exposed that I may safely pass it by; and pass by almost as safely the argument which some have drawn from a chance expression of his in his pathetic letter to Lady Raleigh, in which he ‘hopes that God would send him somewhat before his return.’ To prove an intention of piracy in the despairing words of a ruined man writing to comfort a ruined wife for the loss of her first-born is surely to deal out hard measure. Heaven have mercy upon us, if all the hasty words which woe has wrung from our hearts are to be so judged either by man or God!