le Sir Walter Raleigh
(1552?-1618) represents its adventurous spirit and activity. The life of
Raleigh is an almost incomprehensible mixture of the poet, scholar, and
adventurer; now helping the Huguenots or the struggling Dutch in Europe,
and now leading an expedition into the unmapped wilds of the New World;
busy here with court intrigues, and there with piratical attempts to
capture the gold-laden Spanish galleons; one moment sailing the high seas
in utter freedom, and the next writing history and poetry to solace his
imprisonment. Such a life in itself is a volume far more interesting than
anything that he wrote. He is the restless spirit of the Elizabethan Age
personified.

Raleigh's chief prose works are the _Discoverie of Guiana_, a work which
would certainly have been interesting enough had he told simply what he
saw, but which was filled with colonization schemes and visions of an El
Dorado to fill the eyes and ears of the credulous; and the _History of the
World_, written to occupy his prison hours. The history is a wholly
untrustworthy account of events from creation to the downfall of the
Macedonian Empire. It is interesting chiefly for its style, which is simple
and dignified, and for the flashes of wit and poetry that break into the
fantastic combination of miracles, traditions, hearsay, and state records
which he called history. In the conclusion is the famous apostrophe to
Death, which suggests what Raleigh might have done had he lived less
strenuously and written more carefully.

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

JOHN FOXE (1516-1587). Foxe will be remembered always for his famous _Book
of Martyrs_, a book that our elders gave to us on Sundays when we were
young, thinking it good discipline for us to afflict our souls when we
wanted to be roaming the sunlit fields, or when in our enforced idleness we
would, if our own taste in the matter had been consulted, have made good
shift to be quiet and happy with _Robinson Crusoe_. So we have a gloomy
memory of Foxe, and something of a grievance, which prevent a just
appreciation of his worth.

Foxe had been driven out of