During all the vicissitudes of his long and eventful public life,
Raleigh was still persistently a scholar. He carried his books--his
'trunk of books' with him in all his adventurous voyages; and they
were his 'companions' in the toil and excitement of his campaigns on
land. He studied them in the ocean-storm; he studied them in his tent,
as Brutus studied in his. He studied them year after year, in the dim
light which pierced the deep embrasure of those walls with which
tyranny had thought to shut in at last his world-grasping energies.
He had had some chance to study 'men and manners' in that strange and
various life of his, and he did not lack the skill to make the most of
it; but he was not content with that narrow, one-sided aspect of life
and human nature, to which his own individual personal experience,
however varied, must necessarily limit him. He would see it under
greater varieties, under all varieties of conditions. He would know
the history of it; he would 'delve it to the root.' He would know how
that particular form of it, which he found on the surface in his time,
had come to be the thing he found it. He would know what it had been
in other times, in the beginning, or in that stage of its development
in which the historic light first finds it. He was a man who wished
even to know what it had been in _the Assyrian_, in _the Phenician_,
in _the Hebrew_, in _the Egyptian_; he would see what it had been in
_the Greek_, and in _the Roman_. He was, indeed, one of that clique of
Elizabethan Naturalists, who thought that there was no more curious
thing in nature; and instead of taking a Jack Cade view of the
subject, and inferring that an adequate knowledge of it comes by
nature, as reading and writing do in that worthy's theory of
education, it was the private opinion of this school, that there was
no department of learning which a scholar could turn his attention to,
that required a more severe and thorough study and experiment, and
none that a man of a truly _scientific_ turn of mind would find better
worth his leisure. And the study of antiquity had not yet come to be
then what it is now; at least, with men of this stamp. Such men did
not study it to discipline their minds, or to get a classic finish to
their style. The books that such a man as this could take the trouble
to carry about with him on such errands as those that he travelled on,
were books that had in them, for the eager eyes that then o'er-ran
them, the world's 'news'--the world's story. They were full of the
fresh living data of his conclusions. They were notes that the master
minds of all the ages had made for him; invaluable aid and sympathy
they had contrived to send to him. The man who had been arrested in
his career, more ignominiously than the magnificent Tully had been in
_his_,--in a career, too, a thousand times more noble,--by a Caesar,
indeed, but _such_ a Caesar;--the man who had sat for years with the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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