my library, so that
you may recognise, as you ought, the pomp and majesty of the speech of
England.

One of the great qualities that was always present in the writings of
Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the
nineteenth century was its restraint.

Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect self-control.

The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became the
noble mastery of himself.

When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which county
you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the Tower of
London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the next day at
the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his beloved wife, with a
piece of coal, because they even denied him pen and ink, face to face
with death, he yet observed a calm and noble language that is truly
magnifical--to use the old Bible word.

"For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied
your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit
down by sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear
God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him.
Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a
Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you.

"I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time when
all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world.

"Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it
at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my
father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me
away.

"The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and Inscrutable God, that
Almighty God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life
and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on me and teach me
to forgive my persecutors and false accusers, and send us to meet
in His Glorious Kingdom. My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor
boy, pray for me. My true God hold you both in His Arms.

"Written with the dying hand of, sometime thy husband, but now
alas! overthrown, yours that was, but now not my own.

"WALTER RALEGH."

Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to his untimely end, had written
in his great _History of the World_ a wonderful passage about death; it
is justly celebrated, and is familiar to all men of letters throughout the
world, so I will quote a p