er of romantic
violence, and to stamp it with meaning. If Raleigh had been thrown from
his horse or had died of the ague in his bed, we should have been
depressed by the squalid circumstances, we should have been less
conscious than we are now of his unbroken magnanimity. His failures and
his excesses had made him unpopular throughout England, and he was both
proud and peevish in his recognition of the fact. He declared that he
was "nothing indebted" to the world, and again that, "the common people
are evil judges of honest things." But the thirteen years of his
imprisonment caused a reaction. People forgot how troublesome he had
been and only recollected his magnificence. They remembered nothing but
that he had spent his whole energy and fortune in resisting the
brutality and avarice of the Spaniard.

Then came the disgraceful scene of his cross-examination at Westminster,
and the condemnation by his venal judges at the order of a paltry king.
It became known, or shrewdly guessed, that Spain had sent to James I. a
hectoring alternative that Raleigh must be executed in London or sent
alive for a like purpose to Madrid. The trial was a cowardly and
ignominious submission of the English Government to the insolence of
England's hereditary enemy. Raleigh seemed for the moment to have failed
completely, yet it was really like the act of Samson, who slew more men
at his death than in all his life. Samuel Pepys, who had some fine
intuitions at a time when the national _moral_ was very low, spoke of
Raleigh as being "given over, as a sacrifice," to our enemies. This has
been, in truth, the secret of his unfailing romantic popularity, and it
is the reason of the emotion which has called us together here three
hundred years after his death upon the scaffold.

[Footnote 1: Address delivered at the Mansion House, October 29th, 1918,
on occasion of the Tercentenary of Sir Walter Raleigh's death.]

THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE

Among the "co-supremes and stars of love" which form the constellated
glory of our greatest poet there is one small splendour which we are apt
to overlook in our general survey. But, if we isolate it from other
considerations, it is surely no small thing that Shakespeare created and
introduced into our literature the Dramatic Song. If with statistical
finger we turn the pages of all his plays, we shall discover, not
perhaps without surprise, that these contain not fewer than fifty
strains of lyrical me