test
fight of all; and Sir Walter Raleigh, a philosopher among courtiers, a
poet among princes, statesman, dreamer, adventurer, who planned nobly
and executed daringly, and failed more greatly than other men succeed.
Millais has drawn him for us, in his boyhood, sitting on the beach at
Budleigh Salterton, with the wind blowing his hair round his sensitive,
eager face, hugging his knees as he listens to the stories of the
sailor with the bright parrot-feathers in his hat, one of the men,
perhaps, who sailed with Frobisher or terrible John Hawkins, round the
world to the far-off coasts of adventure, the lands of gold and spices.
It is to Raleigh, and to his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, that
we owe the first colony of America, "Virginia," called so by Raleigh
from the Virgin Queen, in the compliment of his day--to them is due the
praise of having seen that "colonization, trade, and the enlargement of
Empire, were all more important for the welfare of England than the
acquisition of gold," and this in an age which was dazzled by the
facilities of wealth lying ready to the greedy hand in that "New World."

And this mind, so daring, so original, so diverse, which could turn a
sonnet or design a battleship (for the _Ark Raleigh_, built after his
plans, was admittedly the best ship of our fleet that met the Armada),
which had experienced the favour and disfavour of princes in the
fullest degree, which had known triumph and discouragement beyond the
ordinary measure of humanity, turned in the last dark years of
imprisonment to a steady contemplation of human activity, and, largely
conceiving here, as in all else, planned a "History of the World." Let
his own noble words be his epitaph:

"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast
persuaded; what none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world
have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou
hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride,
cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two
narrow words, 'Hic jacet.'"

And then there was Drake--Drake, whose name perhaps overshadows all
other names in Devon; Drake, who

"was playing a rubber of bowls
When the great Armada came;"

but, being told of the sighting of the fleet, remarked that "they must
wait their turn, good souls," and continued his game; Drake, who, the
year before the sailing of the Armada, "singed t