But it was not on the New World wholly, that this man of many toils could afford to lavish the revenues which the Queen's favour brought him. It was not to that enterprise alone that he was willing to dedicate the _eclat_ and influence of his rising name. There was work at home which concerned him more nearly, not less deeply, to which that new influence was made at once subservient; and in that there were enemies to be encountered more formidable than the Spaniard on his own deck, or on his own coast, with all his war-weapons and defences. It was an enemy which required a strategy more subtle than any which the exigencies of camp and field had called for. The fact that this hero throughout all his great public career--so full of all kinds of excitement and action--enough, one would say, to absorb the energies of a mind of any ordinary human capacity--that this soldier whose name had become, on the Spanish coasts, what the name of '_Coeur de Lion_' was in the Saracen nursery, that this foreign adventurer who had a fleet of twenty-three ships sailing at one time on his errands--this legislator, for he sat in Parliament as representative of his native shire--this magnificent courtier, who had raised himself, without any vantage-ground at all, from a position wholly obscure, by his personal achievements and merits, to a place in the social ranks so exalted; to a place in the state so _near_ that--which was chief and absolute--the fact that this many-sided man of deeds, was all the time a literary man, not a scholar merely, but himself an Originator, a Teacher, the Founder of a School--this is the explanatory point in this history--this is the point in it which throws light on all the rest of it, and imparts to it its true dignity. For he was not a mere blind historical agent, driven by fierce instincts, intending only their own narrow ends, without any faculty of comprehensive survey and choice of intentions; impelled by thirst of adventure, or thirst of power, or thirst of gold, to the execution of his part in the great human struggle for conservation and advancement; working like other useful agencies in the Providential Scheme--like 'the stormy wind fulfilling his pleasure.'