2. SIR WALTER RALEIGH (+1552-1618+).-- +Walter Raleigh+, soldier, statesman, coloniser, historian, and poet, was born in Devonshire, in the year 1552. He was sent to Oriel College, Oxford; but he left at the early age of seventeen to fight on the side of the Protestants in France. From that time his life is one long series of schemes, plots, adventures, and misfortunes-- culminating in his execution at Westminster in the year 1618. He spent “the evening of a tempestuous life” in the Tower, where he lay for thirteen years; and during this imprisonment he wrote his greatest work, the +History of the World+, which was never finished. His life and adventures belong to the sixteenth; his works to the seventeenth century. Raleigh was probably the most dazzling figure of his time; and is “in a singular degree the representative of the vigorous versatility of the Elizabethan period.” Spenser, whose neighbour he was for some time in Ireland, thought highly of his poetry, calls him “the summer’s nightingale,” and says of him-- “Yet æmuling[18] my song, he took in hand My pipe, before that æmulëd of many, And played thereon (for well that skill he conn’d), Himself as skilful in that art as any.” Raleigh is the author of the celebrated verses, “Go, soul, the body’s guest;” “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet;” and of the lines which were written and left in his Bible on the night before he was beheaded:-- “Even such is time, that takes in trust Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with age and dust; Who, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days: But from this earth, this grave, this dust, The Lord shall raise me up, I trust!” Raleigh’s prose has been described as “some of the most flowing and modern-looking prose of the period;” and there can be no doubt that, if he had given himself entirely to literature, he would have been one of the greatest poets and prose-writers of his time. His style is calm, noble, and melodious. The following is the last sentence of the +History of the World+:-- “O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words _Hic jacet_.” [Footnote 18: Emulating.]