was very fond of paintings, and of music; and, in literature as in art, he possessed a cultivated and correct taste. He was one of those rare men who seem qualified to excel in all pursuits alike; and his talents were set off by an extraordinary laboriousness and capacity of application. As a navigator, soldier, statesman, and historian, his name is intimately and honourably linked with one of the most brilliant periods of British history.

The works of Oldys, Birch, Cayley, Mrs. Thompson, and Mr. Tytler, may be consulted concerning this remarkable person. The Life by the last-named gentleman, published in the Edinburgh Cabinet Library,' is the most recent; and the industry of the author has enabled him to gain a clue to some points which before had been imperfectly understood. A list of Raleigh's numerous works is given in the Biographia Britannica.' They will be found collected in eight volumes, in the Oxford edition of 1829. Several of his MSS. are preserved in the British Museum.

THERE is no life the chronological course of which is more distinctly known than that of Camden; but it is the life merely of a student and a man of letters, consisting mostly in the history of his publications, and affording scarcely any anecdotical matter. Nor did he take

part in any of the public transactions of his time, except only as an observer and recorder. It thus happens that in a case in which the materials of biography are unusually ample and satisfactory, the biography itself must still be but dry and meagre. Everything can be told, but there is not much of general interest to tell.

William Camden was a Londoner born. His birth took place on the 2nd of May, 1551, in the Old Bailey, at the house of his father, Samson Camden, who was a member of the Company of Painter-Stainers. This company, according to Maitland, the historian of London, still use every Saint Luke's Day, at the election of the master, a silver cup and cover which was given to

them by the great antiquary, as is recorded upon it in a Latin inscription, in which he styles himself "Gul. Camdenus, Clarenceux, filius Samsonis, Pictoris, Londinensis" (William Camden, Clarenceux, son of Samson, painter, of London); the old master drinks out of it to the new one. It appears from Camden's will that he bequeathed the company sixteen pounds to buy them a piece of plate, upon which he directed the above inscription to be engraved. Gibson says that he left them a gilt bowl of sixteen pounds; but this would be a somewhat inconvenient weight for a drinking-cup. Camden's father was a Staffordshire man, having been born in Lichfield, whence he was sent, when very young, to London. His mother's family he has himself commemorated in his Britannia, where, in noticing the town of Wirkinton, or Workington, in Cumberland, he says (in Bishop Gibson's English translation), "It is now the seat of the ancient knightly family of the Curwens, descended from Gospatric, Earl of Northumberland, who took that name, by covenant, from Culwen, a family of Galloway, the heir whereof they had married. Here they have a stately castle-like seat; and from this family (excuse the vanity) I myself am descended by the mother's side."

He is said, in more than one of the earlier accounts of him, to have been for some time one of the Blue-coat boys. The school of Christ's Hospital was established by King Edward VI. the year after Camden came into the world; but the records perished in the great fire of 1666; and it is now impossible to ascertain what truth there may be in the statement that he was a scholar there. He says nothing to that effect himself in a paper of brief memoranda of his boyhood which he left behind him. But he there notes that at twelve years of age he was attacked by the plague, upon which he was sent for country air to Islington; and that when he recovered, and returned home, he was put to St. Paul's School.

From St. Paul's he proceeded to the University of Oxford, where he was entered a servitor at Magdalen College, in 1566. Missing the place of what is called a demy in that college (a scholar or half-fellow), he re