Sir Julius Cæsar, again, one of the commission appointed to examine him, informs us that, on being confronted with Captains St. Leger and Pennington, he confessed that he proposed the taking of the Mexico fleet if the mine failed. To which I can only answer, that all depends on how the thing was said, and that this is the last fact which we should find in Sir Julius’s notes, which are, it is confessed, so confused, obscure, and full of gaps, as to be often hardly intelligible. The same remark applies to Wilson’s story, which I agree with Mr. Tytler in thinking worthless. Wilson, it must be understood, is employed after Raleigh’s return as a spy upon him, which office he executes, all confess (and Wilson himself as much as any), as falsely, treacherously, and hypocritically as did ever sinful man; and, _inter alia_, he has this, ‘This day he told me what discourse he and the Lord Chancellor had about taking the Plate-fleet, which he confessed he would have taken had he lighted on it.’ To which my Lord Chancellor said, ‘Why, you would have been a pirate.’ ‘Oh,’ quoth he, ‘did you ever know of any that were pirates for millions? They only that wish for small things are pirates.’ Now, setting aside the improbability that Raleigh should go out of his way to impeach himself to the man whom he must have known was set there to find matter for his death, all, we say, depends on how it was said. If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, ‘To take the Mexico fleet would be piracy,’ it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an answer. The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact. He is not expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing in that passage of his ‘Apology,’ about which I must complain of Mr. Napier. ‘It was a maxim of his,’ says Mr. Napier, ‘that good success admits of no examination.’ This is not fair. The sentence in the original goes on, ‘so the contrary allows of no excuse, however reasonable and just whatsoever.’ His argument all through the beginning of the ‘Apology,’ supported by instance on instance from history, is—I cannot get a just hearing, because I have failed in opening this mine. So it is always. Glory covers the multitude of sins. But a man who has failed is a fair mark for every slanderer, puppy, ignoramus, discontented mutineer; as I am now. What else, in the name of common sense, could have been his argument? Does Mr. Napier really think that Raleigh, even if, in the face of all the noble and pious words which he had written, he held so immoral a doctrine, would have been shameless and senseless enough to assert his own rascality in an apology addressed to the most ‘religious’ of kings in the most canting of generations?