t exquisite and fanciful where his subject is most unhopeful,
and, on the other hand, he is likely to disappoint us where we take for
granted that he will be fine. For example, the series of sections on the
Terrestrial Paradise are singularly crabbed and dusty in their display
of Rabbinical pedantry, and the little touch in praise of Guiana is
almost the only one that redeems the general dryness. It is not mirth,
or beauty, or luxury that fires the historian, but death. Of mortality
he has always some rich sententious thing to say, praising 'the
workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business of a wretched
life.' So the most celebrated passages of the whole book, and perhaps
the finest, are the address to God which opens the _History_, and the
prose hymn in praise of death which closes it. The entire absence of
humour is characteristic, and adds to the difficulty of reading the book
straight on. The story of Periander's burning the clothes of the women
closes with a jest; there is, perhaps, no other occasion on which the
solemn historian is detected with a smile upon his lips.

By far the most interesting and readable, part of the _History of the
World_ is its preface. This is a book in itself, and one in which the
author condescends to a lively human interest. We cheerfully pass from
Elihu the Buzite, and the conjectures of Adricomius respecting the
family of Ram, to the actualities of English and Continental history in
the generation immediately preceding that in which Raleigh was writing.
When we consider the position in which the author stood towards James I.
and turn to the pages of his Preface, we refuse to believe that it was
without design that he expressed himself in language so extraordinary.
It would have been mere levity for a friendless prisoner, ready for the
block, to publish this terrible arraignment of the crimes of tyrant
kings, unless he had some reason for believing that he could shelter
himself successfully under a powerful sympathy. This sympathy, in the
case of Sir Walter Raleigh, could be none other than that of Prince
Henry; and it may well have been in the summer of 1612, when, as we
know, he was particularly intimate with the Prince and busied in his
affairs, that he wrote the Preface. With long isolation from the world,
he had lost touch of public affairs, as _The Prerogative of Parliament_
would alone be sufficient to show. It is probable that he exaggerated
the influence of the yo