difficulties of
the subject. Ralegh's multifarious activity, with the width of the area
in which it operated, is itself a disturbing element. It is confusing
for a biographer to be required to keep at once independent and in
unison the poet, statesman, courtier, schemer, patriot, soldier, sailor,
freebooter, discoverer, colonist, castle-builder, historian,
philosopher, chemist, prisoner, and visionary. The variety of Ralegh's
powers and tendencies, and of their exercise, is the distinctive note of
him, and of the epoch which needed, fashioned, and used him. A whole
band of faculties stood ready in him at any moment for action. Several
generally were at work simultaneously. For the man to be properly
visible, he should be shown flashing from more facets than a brilliant.
Few are the pens which can vividly reflect versatility like his. The
temptation to diffuseness and irrelevancy is as embarrassing and
dangerous. At every turn Ralegh's restless vitality involved him in a
web of other men's fortunes, and in national crises. A biographer is
constantly being beguiled into describing an era as well as its
representative, into writing history instead of a life. Within an
author's legitimate province the perplexities are numberless and
distracting. Never surely was there a career more beset with insoluble
riddles and unmanageable dilemmas. At each step, in the relation of the
most ordinary incidents, exactness of dates, or precision of events,
appears unattainable. Fiction is ever elbowing fact, so that it might be
supposed contemporaries had with one accord been conspiring to disguise
the truth from posterity. The uncertainty is deepened tenfold when
motives have to be measured and appraised. Ralegh was the best hated
personage in the kingdom. On a conscientious biographer is laid the
burden of allowing just enough, and not too much, for the gall of
private, political, and popular enmity. He is equally bound to remember
and account, often on the adverse side, for inherent contradictions in
his hero's own moral nature. While he knows it would be absurdly unjust
to accept the verdict of Ralegh's jealous and envious world on his
intentions, he has to beware of construing malicious persecution as
equivalent to proof of angelic innocence.

One main duty of a biographer of Ralegh is to be strenuously on the
guard against degenerating into an apologist. But, above all, he ought
to be versed in the art of standing aside. While expla