dman, Francis
Osborn, Sir Edward Peyton, Sir Henry Wotton, John Aubrey, Sir William
Sanderson, David Lloyd, and James Howell, is far from exhausting the
number of the very miscellaneous purveyors and chroniclers.

Antiquaries, from the days of John Hooker of Exeter, the continuer of
Holinshed, Sir William Pole, Anthony a Wood, and John Prince, to those
of Lysons, Polwhele, Isaac D'Israeli, Payne Collier, and Dr. Brushfield,
have found boundless hunting-ground in his habits, acts, and motives.
Sir John Hawles, Mr. Justice Foster, David Jardine, Lord Campbell, and
Spedding have discussed the technical justice of his trials and
sentences. No historian, from Camden and de Thou, to Hume, Lingard,
Hallam, and Gardiner, has been able to abstain from debating his merits
and demerits. From his own age to the present the fascination of his
career, and at once the copiousness of information on it, and its
mysteries, have attracted a multitude of commentators. His character has
been repeatedly analysed by essayists, subtle as Macvey Napier, eloquent
as Charles Kingsley. There has been no more favourite theme for
biographers. Since the earliest and trivial account compiled by William
Winstanley in 1660, followed by the anonymous and tolerably industrious
narrative attributed variously to John, Benjamin, and James, Shirley in
1677, and Lewis Theobald's meagre sketch in 1719, a dozen or more lives
with larger pretensions to critical research have been printed, by
William Oldys in 1736, Thomas Birch in 1751, Arthur Cayley in 1805, Sir
Samuel Egerton Brydges in 1813, Mrs. A.T. Thomson in 1830, Patrick
Fraser Tytler in 1833, Robert Southey in 1837, Sir Robert Hermann
Schomburgk in 1848, C. Whitehead in 1854, S.G. Drake, of Boston, U.S.,
in 1862, J.A. St. John in 1868, Edward Edwards in the same year, Mrs.
Creighton in 1877, and Edmund Gosse in 1886.

Almost every one of this numerous company, down even to bookmaking
Winstanley the barber, has shed light, much or little, upon dark
recesses. By four, Oldys, Cayley, Tytler, and Edwards, the whole
learning of the subject, so far as it was for their respective periods
available, must be admitted to have been most diligently accumulated.
Yet it will scarcely be denied that there has always been room for a new
presentment of Ralegh's personality. That the want has remained
unsatisfied after all the efforts made to supply it is to be imputed
less to defects in the writers, than to the intrinsic