'Cynthia,'--that twin sister of Phoebus Apollo,--to make her the patron, if not the inspirer of the Elizabethan genius. 'When will you cease to be a beggar, Raleigh?' she said to him one day, on one of these not infrequent occasions. 'When your Majesty ceases to be a most gracious mistress,' was this courtier's reply. It is recorded of her, that 'she loved to hear his reasons to her demands.' But though, with all his wit and eloquence, he could not contrive to make of the grand-daughter of Henry the Seventh, a Pericles, or an Alexander, or a Ptolemy, or an Augustus, or an encourager of anything that did not appear to be directly connected with her own particular ends, he did succeed in making her indirectly a patron of the literary and scientific development which was then beginning to add to her reign its new lustre,--which was then suing for leave to lay at her feet its new crowns and garlands. Indirectly, he did convert her into a patron,--a second-hand patron of those deeper and more subtle movements of the new spirit of the time, whose bolder demonstrations she herself had been forced openly to head. Seated on the throne of Henry the Seventh, she was already the armed advocate of European freedom;--Raleigh had contrived to make her the legal sponsor for the New World's liberties; it only needed that her patronage should be systematically extended to that new enterprise for the emancipation of the human life from the bondage of ignorance, from the tyranny of unlearning,--that enterprise which the gay, insidious Elizabethan literature was already beginning to flower over and cover with its devices,--it only needed _that_, to complete the anomaly of her position. And that through Raleigh's means was accomplished.