And He hath angels, but no fees. And when the grand twelve-million jury Against our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads his death and then we live." Again to his wife, in a last letter from his prison, he writes: "You shall receive, my dear wife, my last words in these my last lines: my love I send you, that you may keep when I am dead; and my counsel, that you may remember when I am no more. I would not with my will, present you sorrows, my dear Bess: let them go to the grave with me and be buried in the dust. And seeing that it is not the will of God that I shall meet you any more, bear my destruction patiently, and with a heart like yourself. "I beseech you for the love that you bear me living, that you do not hide yourself many days; but, by your labors seek to help my miserable fortunes, and the rights of your poor child. Your mourning cannot avail me, that am but dust. I sued for my life, but, God knows, it was for you and yours that I desired it: for, know it, my dear wife, your child is the child of a true man, who in his own respect, despiseth Death and his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much (God knows how hardly I steal this time when all sleep), and it is also time for me to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you, and either lay it in Sherborne or Exeter church, by my father and mother. "My dear wife, farewell; bless my boy; pray for me; and let my true God hold you both in his arms." It is not as a literary man proper that I have spoken of Raleigh; the poems that he wrote were very few, nor were they overfine; but they did have the glimmer in them of his great courage and of his clear thought. They were never collected in book shape in his own day, nor, indeed, till long after he had gone: they were only occasional pieces,* coming to the light fitfully under stress of mind-a trail of fire-sparks, as we may say, flying off from under the trip-hammer of royal wrath or of desperate fortunes. Even his History was due to his captivity; his enthusiasms, when he lived them in freedom, were too sharp and quick for words. They spent themselves in the blaze of battles-in breasting stormy seas that washed shores where southern cypresses grew, and golden promises opened with every sunrise. * Unless we except The Ocean to Cynthia, piquant fragments of which exist, extending to some five hundred lines; the poem, by the estimate of Mr. Gosse, may have reached in its entirety a length of ten thousand lines. See Athenæum for January 2, 1886; also, Raleigh (pp. 44-48) by Edmund Gosse. London, 1886. And when I consider his busy and brilliant and perturbed life, with its wonderful adventures, its strange friendships, its toils, its quiet hours with Spenser upon the Mulla shore, its other hours amidst the jungles of the Orinoco, its lawless gallantries in the court of Elizabeth, its booty snatched from Spanish galleons he has set ablaze, its perils, its long captivities-it is the life itself that seems to me a great Elizabethan epic, with all its fires, its mated couples of rhythmic sentiment, its poetic splendors, its shortened beat and broken pauses and blind turns, and its noble climacteric in a bloody death that is without shame and full of the largest pathos. When you read Charles Kingsley's story of Westward, Ho! (which you surely should read, as well as such other matter as the same author has written relating to Raleigh) you will get a live glimpse of this noble knight of letters, and of those other brave and adventurous sailors of Devonshire, who in those times took the keels of Plymouth over great wastes of water. Kingsley writes of the heroes of his native Devon, in the true Elizabethan humor-putting fiery love and life into his writ ing; the roar of Atlantic gales breaks into his pages, and they show, up and down, splashes of storm-driven brine. Nigel and Harrison. In going back now to the earlier years of King James' reign, I shall make no apology for calling attention to that engaging old story of the Fortunes of Nigel. I know it is the fashion with many of the astute critics of the day to pick flaws in Sir Walter, and to expatiate on his blunders and shortcomings; nevertheless, I do not think my readers can do better-in aiming to acquaint themselves with this. epoch of English history — than to read over again Scott's representation of the personality and the surroundings of the pedant King. There may be errors in minor dates, errors of detail; but the larger truths respecting the awkwardness and the pedantries of the first Stuart King, and respecting the Scotch adventurers who hung pressingly upon his skirts, and the lawless street scenes which in those days did really disturb the quietude of the great metropolis, are pictured with a liveliness which will make them unforgetable. Macaulay says that out of the gleanings left by historic harvesters Scott has made " a history scarce less valuable than theirs." Nor do I think there is in the Fortunes of Nigel a deviation from the truth (of which many must be admitted) so extravagant and misleading as Mr. Freeman's averment, that in Ivanhoe "there is a mistake in every line." There are small truths and large truths; and the competent artist knows which to seize upon. Titian committed some fearful anachronisms, and put Venetian stuffs upon Judean women; Balthasar Denner, on the other hand, painted with minute truthfulness every stubby hair in a man's beard, and no tailor could have excepted to his button-holes: nobody knows Denner; Titian reigns. Among those whom Scott placed under tribute for much of his local coloring was a gossipy, kindly clergyman, William Harrison* by name, who was *William Harrison, b. 1534; d. 1593. It is interesting to know that much has come to light respecting the personal history of William Harrison, through the investigations of that indefatigable American genealogist, the late Colonel J. L. Chester. |