narrative rises and falls with the occasion; it is always bright and
apt. Charles James Fox bracketed Bacon, Ralegh, and Hooker, as the three
writers of prose who most enriched the English language in the period
between 1588 and 1640. The diction of the History establishes Ralegh's
title to the praise. It is clear, flowing, elastic, and racy, and
laudably free, as Hallam has testified, from the affectation and passion
for conceits, the snare of contemporary historians, preachers, and
essayists. If Pope, as Spence represents, rejected Ralegh's works as
'too affected' for one of the foundations of an English dictionary, he
must have been talking at random. At all events, he contradicted his own
judgment deliberately expressed in authentic verse. For style, for wit,
mother wit and Court wit, and for a pervading sense that the reader is
in the presence of a sovereign spirit, the _History of the World_ will,
to students now as to students of old, vindicate its rank as a classic.
But its true grandeur is in the scope of the conception, which exhibits
a masque of the Lords of Earth, 'great conquerors, and other troublers
of the world,' rioting in their wantonness and savagery, as if Heaven
cared not or dared not interpose, yet made to pay in the end to the last
farthing of righteous vengeance. They are paraded paying it often in
their own persons, wrecked, ruined, humiliated; and always in those of
their descendants. At times it has seemed as if God saw not. In truth
'He is more severe unto cruel tyrants than only to hinder them of their
wills.' Israelite judges, Assyrian kings, Alexander, the infuriate and
insatiable conqueror, May-game monarchs like Darius, Rehoboam with his
'witless parasites,' so unlike wise, merciful, generous King James and
his, Antiochus, 'acting and deliberating at once, in the inexplicable
desire of repugnancies, which is a disease of great and overswelling
fortunes,' Consul AEmilius, sacking all innocent Epirus to show his
vigour, down to Henry the Eighth, 'pattern of a merciless prince,' none
of them escaped without penalties in their households; none elude their
condemnation and sentences, sometimes, as in the case of Alexander, it
may be deemed, a little too austere, before the tribunal of posterity.
On moves the world's imperial pageant; now slowly and somewhat heavily,
through the domain of Scriptural annals, with theological pitfalls at
every step for the reputed free-thinker; now, as Greek and R