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 rogue. If we had received such a letter from a friend, we should have said at once, ‘Why the man, in his hurry and confusion, has omitted _the_ word; he must have meant to write, not “There is none on the face of the earth that I would be fastened to,” but “There is none on the face of the earth that I would _rather_ be fastened to,”‘ which would at once make sense and suit fact. For Raleigh not only married Miss Throgmorton forthwith, but made her the best of husbands. My conjectural emendation may go for what it is worth: but that the passage, as it stands in Murdin’s State Papers (the MSS. I have not seen) is either misquoted, or mis-written by Raleigh himself, I cannot doubt. He was not one to think nonsense, even if he scribbled it.