st active mind, though excellent in their kind, were evidently
composed by one who was not abstracted in curious and remote inquiries,
but full of the daily business and the wisdom of human life. His
confinement in the Tower, which lasted several years, was indeed
sufficient for the composition of this folio volume, and of a second
which appears to have occupied him. But in that imprisonment it
singularly happened that he lived among literary characters with most
intimate friendship. There he joined the Earl of Northumberland, the
patron of the philosophers of his age, and with whom Rawleigh pursued
his chemical studies; and Serjeant Hoskins, a poet and a wit, and the
poetical "father" of Ben Jonson, who acknowledged that "It was Hoskins
who had polished him;" and that Rawleigh often consulted Hoskins on his
literary works, I learn from a manuscript. But however literary the
atmosphere of the Tower proved to Rawleigh, no particle of Hebrew, and
perhaps little of Grecian lore, floated from a chemist and a poet. The
truth is, that the collection of the materials of this history was the
labour of several persons, who have not all been discovered. It has been
ascertained that Ben Jonson was a considerable contributor; and there
was an English philosopher from whom Descartes, it is said even by his
own countrymen, borrowed largely--Thomas Hariot, whom Anthony Wood
charges with infusing into Rawleigh's volume philosophical notions,
while Rawleigh was composing his History of the World. But if
Rawleigh's _pursuits surpassed even those of the most recluse and
sedentary lives_, as Hume observes, we must attribute this to a "Dr.
Robert Burrel, Rector of Northwald, in the county of Norfolk, who was a
great favourite of Sir Walter Rawleigh, and had been his chaplain. All,
or the greatest part of the drudgery of Sir Walter's History for
criticisms, chronology, and reading Greek and Hebrew authors, was
performed by him for Sir Walter."[80] Thus a simple fact, when
discovered, clears up the whole mystery; and we learn how that knowledge
was acquired, which, as Hume sagaciously detected, required "a recluse
and sedentary life," such as the studies and the habits of a country
clergyman would have been in a learned age.

The secret history of another work, still more celebrated than the
History of the World, by Sir Walter Rawleigh, will doubtless surprise
its numerous admirers.

Without the aid of a friendly hand, we should probably hav