er set foot anywhere in the country called generally
Virginia. His expeditions by deputy were themselves confined to the part
which is now North Carolina. All his experiments at the colonization of
that were failures. His L40,000, his colonists, and the polity he framed
for them, had disappeared before any white settlement took root. But he
will always be esteemed the true parent of North American colonization.
An idea like his has life in it, though the plant may not spring up at
once. When it rises above the surface the sower can claim it. Had the
particular region of the New World not eventually become a permanent
English settlement, he would still have earned the merit of authorship
of the English colonizing movement. As Humboldt has said, without him,
and without Cabot, North America might never have grown into a home of
the English tongue.

[Sidenote: _Potatoes and Tobacco._]

Ralegh's Virginian scheme cost much money, and brought in little. It
gave him fame, which he craved still more, and kept the town talking.
His distant seigniory excited the English imagination. He was believed
to have endowed his Sovereign with a new realm. He had the glory of
having enriched his country with new fruits, plants, and flowers. The
nature of the man was that he could touch nothing but immediately it
appropriated itself to him. He is fabled to have been the first to
import mahogany into England from Guiana. He set orange trees in the
garden of his wife's uncle, Sir Francis Carew, at Beddington; and he has
been credited with their first introduction. The Spaniards first brought
potatoes into Europe. Hariot and Lane first discovered them in North
Carolina. He grew them at Youghal, and they became his. Hariot
discoursed learnedly on the virtues of tobacco, and Drake conveyed the
leaf to England. Ralegh smoked, and none but he has the repute of the
fashion. He gave the taste vogue, teaching the courtiers to smoke their
pipes with silver bowls, and supplying them with the leaf. Sir John
Stanhope excuses himself in 1601 from sending George Carew in Ireland
any 'tabacca, because Mr. Secretary and Sir Walter have stored you of
late.' Till he mounted the scaffold, having first 'taken tobacco,' the
kingdom resounded with legends, doubtful enough, of his devotion to this
his familiar genius. It was told how his old manservant deluged him at
Sherborne with spiced ale to put out the combustion inside him; how he
won wagers of the Queen that