To find the first definite shapings of organised secret service we must come to the time of Elizabeth when the Intelligencer and the Spy were well-known characters in the society of the period. The Intelligencer proves highly interesting as a study of the purely parasitical life. In general, he started in life as a man who made it his business to learn what was going on at all the main centres of public and private life, trading off the items to men of business, politicians and diplomatists for the best price he could obtain. He corresponded very closely to the Roman quidnunc with whom the Satires of Horace made us all familiar in our schooldays. Who can forget the picture of that oily Nasidienus—what a nose for news the name holds!—whose chief title to dine with Mæcenas depended on the fact that he constituted in his own person a kind of central news agency upon which all the gossip and intelligence of Rome was sure to converge. For indeed, the famous quidnunc had his own corps of reporters whom he employed to scour the City in quest of tittle-tattle for his patron. The Intelligencer or private newsmonger of Elizabeth's age was, it is recorded, looked upon as a highly respectable member of the workaday classes until, to use a journalistic Americanism, he began to "put it over" on his patrons—meaning to say, when he began to supply them with the news that was not, drawing good money in exchange for false intelligence. Like the free-lance of our own day, the Intelligencer had first of all to build up a connection, as the phrase goes, the same being remunerative, or the reverse, in proportion to the man's energy and reliability. Since in those days he invariably dealt with principals, it happened not so seldom that he effected a permanent way into the good graces of a wealthy patron, rising afterwards to positions of honourable importance. It is, nevertheless, a fact that the majority of these men deteriorated, and for the simple reason that, deeply versed as they became in the sordid architectonics of life of all kinds, social, political and commercial, they quickly shed their ideals. Their previous experience and knowledge of ways and means had, however, fitted them in a peculiar manner for the business of watching other men and they were invariably sought out by personages of wealth and position to exercise the trade of spy, or common informer. And, accordingly, when Burleigh and his congeners were looking around for plausible excuses for killing off Mary of Scotland, they fell back on the services of an informer who had originally made his bow before the public as an Intelligencer. It is not necessary to go into the story of the mysterious "J. B.," whom one Delbena, an Italian adventurer, had introduced to the English Ambassador in Paris, Poulet, as a man of good birth, but desperate in all enterprises and a traitor to the last fibre of his spinal column. The records of Elizabethan days would seem to indicate either that Burleigh and Walsingham were not very astute judges of the common spy, or else that "J. B." was devilishly apt in extracting large sums out of credulous statesmen and diplomats, for it is written that having raised many thousands from Poulet on his simple promise to capture an agent of Mary Stuart, whose papers were certain to incriminate that Queen—why, the rascal failed to deliver goods, to use another expressive newspaper Americanism. Then there was the informer Gifford whose early training as a priest enabled him, in his clerical capacity and with forged credentials, to spy on the great Catholic families of his time, in all cases transmitting false yet incriminating information to Burleigh. His nefarious activities brought at least a dozen men to the execution block in those days. In two years another of the species, one Thomas Phillips, also an ex-Intelligencer, had contracted to the Crown a debt equal to the large sum of £60,000 of our own money on account of infamous work done for its ministers, mostly political, be it said. Indeed, the record of the Elizabethan spy constitutes one long chronicle of the bloodiest treachery in the whole history of secret service, since the Tower, if not Tyburn, invariably figured as the last scene in the life of the unfortunate who fell into the hands of the Queen's sleuths. Treachery seems, for all the halo which surrounds our notion of the "good old days," to have played a part in the whole social fabric as universal as it was sinister, nor can the fact be wondered at, seeing that the promiscuous distribution of the confiscated estates of murdered men, which often in a day rewarded poor men with vast lands, was an ever-present incentive to the cupidity of the adventurer.