a false
charge of conspiracy in the case of Arabella Stuart, a young lady as
virtuous and more unfortunate than sweet Jane Grey, whose treatment by
James would alone have been enough to stamp him with eternal infamy, and
for whose history we refer our readers to the fine novel by Mr. James on
this subject.

At this time, Raleigh was unpopular in England, on account of his supposed
complicity in the death of Essex; and, on the strength of this
unpopularity, he was arraigned, on the single _written_ testimony of one
Cobham, a pardoned convict of the same conspiracy, which testimony he
afterwards retracted, and then again retracted the retractation, and
without one concurring circumstance, without being confronted with the
prisoner, after shameless persecution from Sir Edward Coke, the great
lawyer, then attorney-general, was found guilty by the jury, and sentenced,
contrary to all equity and justice, to the capital penalties of high
treason.

From this year, 1604, until 1618, a period of nearly fourteen years, not
daring to put him at that time to death, he caused him to be confined
strictly in the Tower, a cruel punishment for so quick and active a spirit,
which he probably expected would speedily release him by a natural death
from one whom he regarded as a dangerous and resolute foe, whom he dared
neither openly to dispatch nor honorably to release from unmerited and
arbitrary confinement.

But his cruel anticipations were signally frustrated by the noble
constancy, and calm, self-sustained intrepidity of the noble prisoner, who,
to borrow the words of his detractor, Hume, "being educated amid naval and
military enterprises, had surpassed, in the pursuits of literature, even
those of the most recluse and sedentary lives."

Supported and consoled by his exemplary and excellent wife, he was enabled
to entertain the irksome days and nights of his solitary imprisonment by
the composition of a work, which, if deficient in the points which are now,
in the advanced state of human sciences, considered essential to a great
literary creation, is, as regarded under the circumstances of its
conception and execution, one of the greatest exploits of human ingenuity
and human industry--"The History of the World, by Sir Walter Raleigh."

It was during his imprisonment also that he projected the colonization of
Jamestown, which was carried out in 1606, at his instigation, by the
Bristol Company, of which he was a member. This col