earlier version it is always to their
poetical disadvantage. They were found, as the editor of 1641 says,
amongst Jonson's papers, and I would suggest, as a new hypothesis, that
the less polished draft in the _Underwoods_ is entirely Raleigh's,
having been copied by Jonson verbatim when he was preparing the _History
of the World_ for the press, and that the improved expressions in the
latter were adopted by Raleigh on suggestion from the superior judgment
of Jonson. The character of the verse is peculiarly that of Raleigh.

It was in 1607, as I have conjectured, that Raleigh first began
seriously to collect and arrange materials for the _History of the
World_; in 1614 he presented the first and only volume of this gigantic
enterprise to the public. It was a folio of 1,354 pages, printed very
closely, and if reprinted now would fill about thirty-five such volumes
as are devised for an ordinary modern novel. Yet it brought the history
of the world no lower down than the conquest of Macedon by Rome, and it
is hard to conceive how soon, at this rate of production, Raleigh would
have reached his own generation. He is said to have anticipated that his
book would need to consist of not less than four such folios. In the
opening lines he expresses some consciousness of the fact that it was
late in life for him, a prisoner of State condemned to death at the
King's pleasure, to undertake so vast a literary adventure. 'Had it been
begotten,' he confesses, 'with my first dawn of day, when the light of
common knowledge began to open itself to my younger years, and before
any wound received either from fortune or time, I might yet well have
doubted that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both
it and me, long before the performance.' It is greatly to be desired
that Raleigh could have been as well advised as his contemporary and
possible friend, the Huguenot poet-soldier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, who at
the close of a chequered career also prepared a _Histoire Universelle_,
in which he simply told the story of his own political party in France
through those stormy years in which he himself had been an actor. We
would gladly exchange all these chronicles of Semiramis and Jehoshaphat
for a plain statement of what Raleigh witnessed in the England of
Elizabeth.

The student of Raleigh does not, therefore, rise from an examination of
his author's chief contribution to literature without a severe sense of
disappointment. The b