mis. Keymis
is described by Wood as well read in geography and mathematics. I am
indebted to Professor Jowett for a confirmation from the Register of
Balliol, which Keymis entered in 1579, graduating Master of Arts in
1586, of Wood's statement that he was elected a probationer Fellow in
November, 1582. He was then nineteen years old, and an undergraduate.
Five Bachelors of Arts were elected with him. To him also, of whom there
will be much, too much, hereafter to say, Ralegh was a generous patron.
Ralegh was equally ready to spend his court interest in the service of a
pious theologian like John Udal the Hebraist. Udal in 1590 published of
the Bishops, that they 'cared for nothing but the maintenance of their
dignities, be it the damnation of their own souls, and infinite millions
more.' He was tried for treason, since the Bishops, it was averred,
governed the Church for the Queen. A jury convicted him of authorship of
the book. The Judges iniquitously held that to amount to a conviction of
felony. They therefore sentenced him to death. He prayed Ralegh to
intercede with the Queen to commute his punishment to banishment, 'that
the land might not be charged with his blood.' Ralegh accepted the
office, and Essex combined with him. Retailers of court gossip
conjectured that his kindness was policy. They imagined that he and
Essex were secretly allied, and that Essex was employing him as 'an
instrument from the Puritans to the Queen upon any particular question
of relieving them.' A simpler and more generous motive is the more
probable. He fought for Udal against the same lying spirit of legal
casuistry which was to destroy himself. King James to his honour joined
subsequently in mediating. Among them they saved the enthusiast's neck;
but he died in the Marshalsea, pending a dispute whether he could safely
be permitted to carry his anti-prelatic zeal and immense learning into a
chaplaincy in Guinea.

[Sidenote: _Good Offices._]

Other instances could be mentioned of Ralegh's disposition to pass his
favour on. 'When, Sir Walter,' asked Elizabeth of him, as he came with a
petition from a friend, 'will you cease to be a beggar?' 'When your
gracious Majesty,' was the answer, 'ceases to be a benefactor.' He has
had attributed to him, though obscurely, the project of an institution,
described as an 'office of address,' a species of entrepot at which
either information and useful services, or both, might be exchanged.
Southey in