. Lives of great English writers from Chaucer to Browning. courageous loyal Englishmen too, with honor for goodQueen Bess and unquenchable hatred for Popery andSpain; and they deserve a conspicuous place in theannals of their vigorous age, for more than anythingthey typify its daring spirit, its lust for gain, its un-conquerable energy, and its splendid achievements. Yet these brave sea-captains, however typical, pre-sent a very small feature of a myriad-sided age. Raleghwas of them, but he was more than they. He repre-sents in his brilliant, kaleidoscopic existence, more com-pletely than any
. Lives of great English writers from Chaucer to Browning. courageous loyal Englishmen too, with honor for goodQueen Bess and unquenchable hatred for Popery andSpain; and they deserve a conspicuous place in theannals of their vigorous age, for more than anythingthey typify its daring spirit, its lust for gain, its un-conquerable energy, and its splendid achievements. Yet these brave sea-captains, however typical, pre-sent a very small feature of a myriad-sided age. Raleghwas of them, but he was more than they. He repre-sents in his brilliant, kaleidoscopic existence, more com-pletely than any of his contemporaries, the versatilityof his time. As a statesman he rivaled Cecil; as acourtier, Leicester and Essex; he commanded success-fully on land and sea, and was sometimes called the scourge of Spain ; he was an expert on naval war-fare, seaport fortifications, and ship-building; he organ-ized, financed, and conducted colonization; he sat inParliament for seventeen years; he erected splendidestablishments ; he studied and practiced chemistry and. WALTER RALEGH From the Zucchero portrait in the National Portrait Gallery WALTER RALEGH 23 agriculture ; with a careless mastery he wrote poetry-surpassed only by a few ; his moral reflections are paleonly beside Bacons; his History of the World wasthe inspiration of a century; in his trial he showed anintimate knowledge of the law ; in his death he wascalm and heroic; and his memory was a guiding starto Eliot, Hampden, and Pym. Defeat and despair heknew not; he could conceive and execute the exploitsof a dozen men, — in his own words, he could toilterribly. His versatility, in fact, was his ruin. Men fearedhis indomitable will and hated him for his ability andeasy success. He was unable, moreover, so to givehimseK up to a single project that he achieved finalresults in any one thing. In his many purposes it isindeed hard to find a paramount interest, but thereseems on the whole to have burned most deeply andlasted longest i
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectenglishliterature
