swelling and overflowing
streams might be brought back into their natural channels and old
banks."

Raleigh stood out, as he put it himself, against "the continuance of
this boundless ambition in mortal men." The rulers in Madrid,
transported by their own arrogance, had determined to impose their
religion, their culture, their form of government, on the world. It was
a question whether the vastly superior moral and intellectual energy of
England and France would not be crushed beneath the heel of Spain.
Raleigh was ready to sacrifice everything, to imperil his own soul, to
prevent that. He says you might as well "root out the Christian religion
altogether" as join "the rest of all Europe to Spain." In his zeal to
prevent "the continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men," he
lent himself to acts which we must not attempt to condone. There is no
use in trying to explain away the facts of his cruel and even savage
fanaticism in Ireland when he was governor of Munster. He was always apt
to be abruptly brutal to a man who crossed his path. But even his Irish
career offers aspects on which we may dwell with pure pleasure. Nothing
could be more romantic than those adventures, like the feats of a
paladin of the Faerie Queen, which he encountered in the great wood of
Lismore; while the story of how he carried off Lord and Lady Roche from
their breakfast-table in their own castle of Ballyinharsh, and how he
rode with them up ravines and round precipices in that mad flight from
their retainers, is as rousing as any scene ever imagined by Dumas
_pere_.

Raleigh called himself the Shepherd of the Ocean, and the name fits him
well, even though his flock were less like sheep than like a leash of
hunting leopards. His theory was that with a pack of small and active
pinnaces he could successfully hunt the lumbering Spanish galleons
without their being able to hit back. He was, in contradistinction to
many preceding English admirals, a cautious fighter at sea, and he says,
in a striking passage of the _History of the World_, written towards the
end of his career, "to clap ships together without any consideration
belongs rather to a madman than to a man of war." He must have taken the
keenest interest in the gigantic failure of the Felicissima Armada in
1588, but, tantalisingly enough, we have no record of his part in it. On
the other hand, the two finest of his prose pamphlets, the _Relation of
the Action in Cadiz Harbour_ and