and Essex are dotted with villages and hamlets, whilst on the heights of Highgate cluster a group of windmills. It is a wonderful panorama that the old Dutch artist has handed down to us. Looking at it we see the same scene, the same picture of time-honoured churches and palaces, the noblest river in the world flowing beneath them, and bearing on its shining surface all the pleasure, commerce, industry, and travail of old London, that Shakespeare did, when, standing near his theatre at Bankside, he gazed upon that shifting scene. All is changed now, except the Tower. The great Gothic cathedral of St Paul’s and most of its surrounding churches, whose towers and spires helped to make old London an object of beauty, perished in the great fire which swept over the city fifty years after Visscher drew his panorama. Old London Bridge escaped the fire, and indeed remained until 1834, although the houses clustering over it had been removed at the close of the reign of George II., and the only prominent building in the panorama which Shakespeare or Raleigh would now be able to recognise, could they look across the rivers Styx and Thames, would be the great White Tower with its surrounding lesser towers and battlements. All the rest, like “the baseless fabric of a vision,” has passed away for ever. But to return to Sir Walter Raleigh. He invested all that remained of his own and his wife’s fortunes in furnishing the expedition to Guiana, which proved so disastrous, on which he now embarked. On his return, a ruined man and a prisoner, he expressed his amazement at having thus in one desperate bid placed his life and all that he possessed in that unlucky venture. But before Raleigh had left England, Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador, had told his master, the King of Spain, that Raleigh was a pre-doomed man. For James had not only revealed every detail relating to the Guiana expedition to Gondomar, but on condition that if any subject or property belonging to Spain were touched he had promised to hand over Raleigh to the Spanish Government in order that he might be hanged at Seville. To assure Gondomar of his good faith, James actually showed the ambassador a private letter written him by Raleigh, in which the exact number of his ships, men, and the place where the great silver mine was said to be located on the Orinoco, were all set forth. As the Spaniards claimed the whole of Guiana, it was evident that if Raleigh landed there he must infringe upon the Spanish possessions, and thus place himself, according to James’s promise to Gondomar, in the power of his enemies.