in the work. He prefaced it with
a set of anonymous verses explanatory of an allegorical frontispiece.
The manuscript of them was found among his papers. They have always been
included in his _Underwoods_. Though the version there differs
materially from that prefixed to the History, no reasonable doubt of his
authorship of both exists. His omission openly to claim the lines is
supposed, not unreasonably, by Mr. Edwards, to have been due to his fear
of the prejudice his favour at Court might sustain from an open
connexion with a fame so odious there as Ralegh's. But a year after
Ralegh's death he boasted over his liquor to civil sneering Drummond at
Hawthornden, of other 'considerable' contributions. He had written, he
said, 'a piece to him of the Punic War, which Sir Walter altered and set
in his book.' In general, the best wits of England were, he asserted,
engaged in the production. Algernon Sidney, in his posthumous
_Discourses concerning Government_, repeated this insinuation of
borrowed plumes of learning. Ralegh, he stated, was 'so well assisted in
his _History of the World_, that an ordinary man with the same helps
might have performed the same thing.' This is all bare assertion, and
refuted by the internal evidence of the volume itself, which in its
remarkable consistency of style, method and thought, testifies to its
emanation from a single mind. Ralegh had himself explained with a manly
frankness, which ought to have disarmed suspicion, the extent to which
alone he was indebted for assistance. In his preface he admits he was
altogether ignorant of Hebrew. When a Hebrew passage did not occur in
Arias Montanus, or in the Latin character in Sixtus Senensis, he was at
a loss. 'Of the rest,' he says, 'I have borrowed the interpretation of
some of my learned friends; yet, had I been beholden to neither, yet
were it not to be wondered at; having had an eleven years' leisure to
attain to the knowledge of that or any other tongue.' As a whole, the
History must be recognised as truly his own, his not only in its
multitude of grand thoughts and reflections, but in the narrative and
general texture. It cannot be the less his that some of the 660 authors
it cites may have been searched for him by assistants.

[Sidenote: _Period of Publication._]

As early as 1611 he must have settled the scheme, and even the title, of
the book. On April 15 in that year notice was given in the Registers of
the Stationers' Company of '_The