village because they steal a silver cup; throws back the colonisation of Virginia ten years with his over-strict notions of discipline and retributive justice; and Raleigh requites him for his offence by embalming him, his valour and his death, not in immortal verse, but in immortal prose.  The ‘True Relation of the Fight at the Azores’ gives the keynote of Raleigh’s heart.  If readers will not take that as the text on which his whole life is a commentary they may know a great deal about him, but him they will never know.

The game becomes fiercer and fiercer.  Blow and counterblow between the Spanish king, for the whole West-Indian commerce was a government job, and the merchant nobles of England.  At last the Great Armada comes, and the Great Armada goes again.  Venit, vidit, fugit, as the medals said of it.  And to Walter Raleigh’s counsel, by the testimony of all contemporaries, the mighty victory is to be principally attributed.  Where all men did heroically, it were invidious to bestow on him alone a crown, ob patriam servatam.  But henceforth, Elizabeth knows well that she has not been mistaken in her choice; and Raleigh is better loved than ever, heaped with fresh wealth and honours.  And who deserves them better?

The immense value of his services in the defence of England should excuse him from the complaint which one has been often inclined to bring against him,—Why, instead of sending others Westward Ho, did be not go himself?  Surely he could have reconciled the jarring instruments with which he was working.  He could have organised such a body of men as perhaps never went out before or since on the same errand.  He could have done all that Cortez did, and more; and done it more justly and mercifully.

True.  And here seems (as far as little folk dare judge great folk) to have been Raleigh’s mistake.  He is too wide for real success.  He has too many plans; he is fond of too many pursuits.  The man who succeeds is generally the narrow mall; the man of one idea, who works at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of that; sacrifices everything to that: the fanatic, in short.  By fanatics, whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by ‘liberal-minded men’ at all, has the world’s work been done in all ages.  Amid the modern cants, one of the most mistaken is the cant about the ‘mission of genius,’ the ‘mission of the poet.’  Poets, we hear in some quarters, are the anointed kings of mankind—at least, so the little poets sing, each to his little fiddle.  There is no greater mistake.  It is the practical, prosaical fanatic who does the work; and the poet, if he tries to do it, is certain to put down his spade every five minutes, to look at the prospect, and pick flowers, and moralise on dead asses, till he ends a Néron malgré lui-même, fiddling melodiously while Rome is burning.  And perhaps this is the secret of Raleigh’s failure.  He is a fanatic, no doubt, a true knight-errant: but he is too much of a poet withal.  The sense of beauty enthrals him at every step.  Gloriana’s fairy court, with its chivalries and its euphuisms, its masques and its tourneys, and he the most charming personage in it, are too charming for him—as they would have been for us, reader: and he cannot give them up and go about the one work.  He justifies his double-mindedness to himself, no doubt, as he does to the world, by working wisely, indefatigably, and bravely: but still he has put his trust in princes, and in the children of men.  His sin, as far as we can see, is not against man, but against God; one which we do not nowadays call a sin, but a weakness.  Be it so.  God punished him for it, swiftly and sharply; which I hold to be a sure sign that God also forgave him for it.

So he stays at home, spends, sooner or later, £40,000 on Virginia, writes charming court-poetry with Oxford, Buckhurst, and Paget, brings over Spenser from Ireland and introduces Colin Clout to Gloriana, who loves—as who would not have loved?—that most beautiful of faces and of souls; helps poor puritan Udall out of his scrape as far as he can; begs for Captain Spring, begs for many more, whose names are only known by being connected with some good deed of his.  ‘When, Sir Walter,’ asks Queen Bess, ‘will you cease to be a beggar?’  ‘When your Majesty ceases to be a benefactor.’  Perhaps it is in these days that he set up his ‘office of address’—some sort of agency for discovering and relieving the wants of worthy men.  So all seems to go well.  If he has lost in Virginia, he has gained by Spanish prizes; his wine-patent is bringing him in a large revenue, and the heavens smile on him.  Thou sayest, ‘I am rich and increased in goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art poor and miserable and blind and naked.’  Thou shalt learn it, then, and pay dearly for thy lesson.

For, in the meanwhile, Raleigh falls into a very great sin, for which, as usual with his elect, God inflicts swift and instant punishment; on which, as usual, biographers talk much unwisdom.  He seduces Miss Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour.  Elizabeth is very wroth; and had she not good reason to be wroth?  Is it either fair or reasonable to talk of her ‘demanding a monopoly of love,’ and ‘being incensed at the temerity of her favourite, in presuming to fall in love and marry without her consent?’  Away with such cant.  The plain facts are: that a man nearly forty years old abuses his wonderful gifts of body and mind, to ruin a girl nearly twenty years younger than himself.  What wonder if a virtuous woman—and Queen Elizabeth was virtuous—thought it a base deed, and punished it accordingly?  There is no more to be discovered in the matter, save by the vulturine nose which smells carrion in every rose-bed.  Raleigh has a great attempt on the Plate-fleets in hand; he hurries off from Chatham, and writes to young Cecil on the 10th of March, ‘I mean not to come away, as some say I will, for fear of a marriage, and I know not what . . . For I protest before God, there is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened unto.’

This famous passage is one of those over which the virtuosity of modern times, rejoicing in evil, has hung so fondly, as giving melancholy proof of the ‘duplicity of Raleigh’s character’; as if a man who once in his life had told an untruth was proved by that fact to be a rogue from birth to death: while others have kindly given him the benefit of a doubt whether the letter were not written after a private marriage, and therefore Raleigh, being ‘joined unto’ some one already, had a right to say that he did not wish to be joined to any one.  But I do not concur in this doubt.  Four months after, Sir Edward Stafford writes to Anthony Bacon, ‘If you have anything to do with Sir W. R., or any love to make to Mistress Throgmorton, at the Tower to-morrow you may speak with them.’  This implies that no marriage had yet taken place.  And surely, if there had been private marriage, two people who were about to be sent to the Tower for their folly would have made the marriage public at once, as the only possible self-justification.  But it is a pity, in my opinion, that biographers, before pronouncing upon that supposed lie of Raleigh’s, had not taken the trouble to find out what the words mean.  In their virtuous haste to prove him a liar, they have overlooked the fact that the words, as they stand, are unintelligible, and the argument self-contradictory.  He wants to prove, we suppose, that he does not go to sea for fear of being forced to marry Miss Throgmorton.  It is, at least, an unexpected method of so doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh, to say that he wishes to marry no one at all.  ‘Don’t think that I run away for fear of a marriage, for I do not wish to marry any one on the face of the earth,’ is a speech which may prove Raleigh to have been a fool, and we must understand it before we can say that it proves him a