reserved, magnificent, fearless, in talk incisive even when he spoke in broad Devon, in arts accomplished, by his wife and a few friends worshipped, by the majority of his contemporaries detested, Raleigh eclipsed them all, including Leicester, Sussex, Southampton, Hatton, and even Essex, in the romantic interest which his versatile career has inspired. The region of the Exe and the Otter, so prolific in great seamen; Oriel College; the fields of France, where he served a campaign or two against the League; the Middle Temple and the English camps in the south of Ireland witnessed the training of this paragon among the courtiers of the English Renaissance. In his early days he was famous for his patronage of Bruno, the advanced Italian thinker who was in England in 1583 and again in 1585. He was no less celebrated for his extravagant dress, his hatbands being often composed, we are told, of the costliest pearls. He was equally noted for his avarice and for the rich monopolies he obtained from the Queen and from the sequestrated estates of traitors. His wealth enabled him to build the superb vessel of 200 tons, as she was then deemed, the Ark Raleigh, the flagship of Admiral Howard in 1588, and to fit out the privateering and colonising expeditions which have given him a permanent place in English history. Fierce swashbuckler as he often appeared in his capacity of Captain of the Guard and rival of Essex for his royal mistress's favours, in the quiet study of Durham House overlooking the river Raleigh entertained and patronised with a rare urbanity some of the choicest spirits of the day, such as Spenser, Harriot, Hakluyt, Hooker, and Jonson.1

'Raleigh's career as a man of action may be briefly summarised. In 1596 he was there when Essex singed the Spanish king's beard in Cadiz harbour. The year previous he had sailed to Guiana in search of the fabled " El Dorado," destroying on the way the Spanish town of San José, and on his return he

But we are concerned here with his writings in prose. Of these, only three were published in his lifetime, The Fight about the Isles of the Azores (1590), The Discovery of Guiana (1596), and the History of the World. The History was written in the Tower, where, though Raleigh was comparatively well-treated and indulged in chemical experiments, the society of friends, and other diversions, he necessarily had much time upon his hands, between 1607 and 1614. In large portions of the work he was greatly aided by learned friends. Thus Dr. Burhill assisted him in the interpretation of Hebrew; Harriot was his oracle on disputed questions of chronology or geography; John Hoskins, the arbiter of style, friend of Donne and Selden and informant of Aubrey, is said to have revised the whole work for press; Ben Jonson also read

published his Discovery of the Empire of Guiana. He took a director's part in the colonisation of Virginia, and introduced tobacco and potato plants into Europe. But in 1603 his career as courtier was blighted. Arrested for conspiring with the miserable Lord Cobham against the fox and his cubs (James I. and his children), he attempted suicide in the Tower. Coke, at his trial, set an example which Jeffreys hardly eclipsed, "thou "-ing the prisoner, calling him "viper" or "spider of hell." Condemned to die, Raleigh was under the shadow of this sentence until 1618, when he was sacrificed (October 29th), in part as a propitiatory offering to Spain, after the inevitable failure of his forlorn raid in Guiana. From 1604. after the parody of justice witnessed at his trial (not that Raleigh was guiltless, but that the Crown lawyers were infamous), and since his solitary walks in the Tower were observed by huge crowds, who saw in him one of the last of the little band of heroes of the late reign who sailed beyond the sunset and bore the brunt of the duel with the might of Catholic Spain, Raleigh had become a popular hero. His angry temper, his headstrong arrogance, his overweening ambition, and his damnable pride (as Aubrey had it) were forgotten, and so the strange career of the poet, soldier, scholar, buccaneer, and spoiled courtier was concluded by the superposition of a martyr's crown and halo.

the work in manuscript and claimed to have written, with other sections, much of the narrative of the Second Punic War.

There is no doubt that the liveliest passages came direct from Raleigh's pen, such as the preface, the conjecture that the Garden of Eden and its rivers were rightly to be found in South America, the illustrative comments drawn from contemporary history, the digressions dealing with abstract questions of law, theology, philosophy, and magic, or the ideal form of government, the elaborate portraits of historical personages-Epaminondas, Jezebel, Pyrrhus or Semiramis (a veiled portrait of the Great Queen of his own day), and finally the magnificent apostrophe to eloquent, just and mighty Death," with which the History closes all these are unmistakably Raleigh. The intervening chronicle portions are often extremely lifeless: much of this compilation may well have been the work of erudite assistants under Sir Walter's supervision.

66

The first part of the contemplated History was alone published in the early part of 1614 (two impressions, a second edition followed in 1617), and this brought the work down no farther than 130 B. C., or roughly from chaos to Antiochus the Great. In two subsequent parts of which a few preparatory notes remain Raleigh had intended to bring his history down to 1603. The work involved was greatly encouraged by Raleigh's consistent advocate and hero-worshipper, the young Prince Henry, for whom the prisoner wrote a number of small educational treatises, and upon his death in 1612 the historian lost heart and interest in his colossal undertaking. It remains a signal monument to one of the most interesting and paradoxical figures of this difficult and perplexing era, and as one of the curiosities of rather than vital contributions to English Literature.

The remaining historians of the Elizabethan era, putting

aside Bacon and Raleigh, can be treated in a very brief space. Fuller wrote humorously of the good purpose to which those honest tailors, John Stow and John Speed, had stitched away at English history for the benefit of future generations. Most of the historical compiling was done after this pattern. Raphael Holinshed had continued his Chronicles of England down to 1575, and his noteworthy folio had appeared in 1578 in ample time to prove of yeoman service to Marlowe, Greene, Shakespeare, and contemporary masters of the historic drama. Holinshed died shortly after the publication, but the work was edited with a supplement by John Hooker in 1586.1

'One of the most graphic and entertaining narratives of the Elizabethan period is contained in Harrison's Description of England, a kind of topographical outwork to the Chronicle of Holinshed. It was written by William Harrison, Londoner and Oxonian (Christ Church), who died Winsor canon in 1593, æt. 59. The chronicle was a printer's hodge-podge, but Harrison's animated description of England changing before his eyes leavens the whole mass of uninspired annalising. In its ruder fashion it almost deserves comparison with Macaulay's famous third chapter, or the inspired tableau of France in the third chapter of the second volume of Michelet's Histoire. About the churches and their services, ministers and covetous patrons, he tells us much at first hand. Bells and times of prayer and much stained glass still remained. Images, shrines, rood-lofts, tabernacles, wakes, and bride-ales he gives as superstitions of the past (this in 1577). The "prophecyings were just beginning to come in. The English bishops, says he, were the most learned in Europe, though in gluttony they fell short of their predecessors. Oxford and Cambridge are equal in greatness, so that it is impossible to discriminate between them. He bemoans the high prices, ever rising in spite of England's increased traffic. Wheat bread is a luxury for the rich. The beer, however, is better, or at any rate stronger, than of old. Men took two meals a day only-dinner and supper-and each class had its own hour for dining. In matters of attire he found his countrymen so mutable that, except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see any so disguised-women have

Meanwhile in 1565 John Stow (d. 1605), originally a tailor, a friend and protégé of Archbishop Parker, and one of the antiquarian society founded by that great Churchman, had compiled from a larger basis of original authorities his Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1565); this was followed by his more compendious Chronicles of England 1580, from which was developed the subsequent and better known Annales of England (1592, and subsequent editions), and finally in 1598 appeared his invaluable Survey of London, the basis of all modern London topography. The chief contemporary rival to the Annales of Stow was the well-digested History of Great Britaine (1611) by another wielder of the shears, the diligent John Speed (1552-1629) of Moorfields. The corresponding Britannia (1586) of the scholarly William Camden (1551-1623), head of Westminster School and Clarenceau King-at-Arms, was written in Latin and was not Englished by Holland until 1610, but his Remains and Annals of Elizabeth, written in 1605 and 1615 respectively, were written in English. Sir John Hayward (1564-1627), as became a somewhat larger experience of life, took a more political and less dry-as-dust view of the historical past in his First Part of the Life and Raigne of Henry the IVth, which he dedicated with much temerity

become men and men transformed into monsters. In the manner of building and furnishing houses, he notes three important changes in his time chimneys, bedding, and plate (to which add glass windows) had all been multiplied to admiration. But with these refinements he laments rise of rents and growth of usury. Then, as now, work was scamped, horsedealers were often rogues, Roman coins were dug up, English ships were famous, vagabonds, Egyptians, harlots, and scolds were incorrigible, the fox and badger were preserved by gentry for sport. Beavers lingered on the Tavy (?). English brawn was deemed the rarest treat in foreign parts. An odd story is told of certain Jews in Spain being inveigled into eating it on the supposition that it was fish.