Santa Thome, and a sharp contest ensued, in which the English gained the advantage, and burnt the town. In this action Raleigh’s eldest son was killed. The Spaniards still occupied the passes to the mine, and after an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge them, Keymis abandoned the enterprize, and returned to the ships. Raleigh’s correspondence expresses in affecting terms his grief and indignation at this double misfortune; the loss of a brave and promising son, and the destruction of the hopes which he had founded on this long-cherished adventure. On his return to England, he found himself marked out for a victim to appease the resentment of the Spanish court, to which he had long been an object of fear and hatred. He quietly surrendered himself to Sir Lewis Stukeley, who was sent to Plymouth to arrest him, and commenced the journey to London under his charge. But his mind fluctuated between the desire to confront his enemies, and a sense of the hopelessness of obtaining justice, and he was at last entrapped by the artifices of the emissaries of government who surrounded him into an attempt to escape, in which he was arrested and committed to close custody in the Tower. Here his conversation and correspondence were narrowly watched, in the hopes that a treasonable understanding with the French government, from which he had received the offer of an asylum in France, might be established against him. His conduct abroad had already been closely scrutinized, in the hope of finding some act of piracy, or unauthorized aggression against Spain, for which he might be brought to trial. Both these hopes failing, and his death, in compliment to Spain, being resolved on, it was determined to carry into effect the sentence passed fifteen years before, from which he had never been legally released; and a warrant was accordingly issued to the judges, requiring them to order execution. The case was a novel one, and threw that learned body into some perplexity. They determined, however, that after so long an interval execution could not be granted without allowing the prisoner the opportunity of pleading against it; and Raleigh was therefore brought to the bar of the Court of King’s Bench, October 28, 1618. The record of his conviction having been read, he was asked whether he could urge any thing why the sentence should not be carried into effect. He insisted on the nature of his late commission, and on that plea being overruled, submitted with his usual calmness and dignity. The execution, with indecent haste, was ordered to take place on the following morning. In this last stage of life, his greatness of mind shone with even more than its usual lustre. Calm, and fearless without bravado, his behaviour and speech expressed the piety and resignation of a Christian with the habitual coolness of one who has braved death too often to shrink at its approach. The accounts of his deportment on the scaffold effectually