elf.'
He gives 'all the thanks my heart can conceive for your many troubles
and cares taken for me.' He bids her, for the love she bare him living,
not hide herself many days, but by her travail seek to help her
miserable fortunes, and the right of her poor child. 'If you can live
free from want, care for no more: for the rest is but vanity. Love God,
and begin betimes to repose yourself on Him. When you have wearied your
thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit down by
sorrow in the end.' He does not know to what friend to direct her, for
all his had left him in the time of trial. 'I plainly perceive,' he
continues, 'that my death was determined from the first day.' He asks
her, 'for my soul's health, to pay all poor men.' He warns her against
suitors for her money; 'for the world thinks that I was very rich.' He
prays her, 'Get those letters, if it be possible, which I writ to the
Lords, wherein I sued for my life. God knoweth that it was for you and
yours that I desired it; but it is true that I disdain myself for
begging it. And know it, dear wife, that your son is the child of a true
man, and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his misshapen
and ugly forms. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and
either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue, or in Exeter church by
my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me away.'
Yet he can hardly part with wife or child, and adds still something:
'God teach me to forgive my persecutors and false accusers. My true wife
farewell. Bless my poor boy; pray for me. Yours, that was, but now not
my own.'

[Sidenote: _The Pilgrimage._]

He was more than willing to live. He was not afraid to die. In the
apparent presence of death his soul, as always, recovered its lofty
serenity. With his head, as he thought, on the block, he burst into the
grand dirge of the _Pilgrimage_. Such are the variances of taste that a
writer of reputation has spoken of this noble composition as 'a strange
medley in which faith and confidence in God appear side by side with
sarcasms upon the lawyers and the courtiers.' That is a judgment with
which few will agree. The poem in the most authoritative manuscript is
described as having been composed the night before Ralegh was beheaded.
But it can scarcely be doubted that it belongs to the present period,
when he was daily expecting the arrival of the warrant for his execution
at Winchester. His s