of
achievements.

Having been courtier, colonizer, warrior, Raleigh now blossomed forth as
a poet, and became a friend and patron of Edmund Spenser. He had much
skill in verse, and he was never lacking in imagination. But his real
talents did not lie in that direction, and as in so many other things,
he soon found himself distracted elsewhere.

The story of Raleigh's manhood belongs to history. Turn to tales of
Elizabeth's court and you will find his name on almost every page. Now
he is high in favor, braving it with the great Earl of Leicester, now
down upon his luck, locked in some royal prison, writing verses to his
many friends. His was a strange career; at one time there was no man in
England whose favor was more sought, yet at the end he died upon the
scaffold charged with treason. Time proved him guiltless of the charge,
and almost at once the English people began to realize how great a light
had been extinguished.

Through all his varying career he himself was the same brave, dreamy,
ambitious man, the perfect type of that age which we call the
Elizabethan. He could not stay in his native land of Devon; much as he
loved its moorland and its bays, he had to listen to the call of London
and the sea, and follow where their voices led him. Each way the road
was set with many strange adventures, but he met and passed through them
all with the high spirits that were part of his age. His courage never
failed him, nor his joy in fighting his way to fortune with his own
sharp wits.

IV

Peter the Great

The Boy of the Kremlin: 1672-1725

The halls of the Kremlin, the Czar's palace in Moscow, were filled with
a wild rabble of soldiers on a winter afternoon near the end of the
seventeenth century. The guards of the late Czar Alexis were storming
through the maze of corridors and state apartments, breaking statues,
tearing down tapestries, and piercing and cutting to pieces invaluable
paintings with their spears and swords.

They were big, savage-faced men, pets of the half-civilized Russian
rulers, and were called the Streltsi Guard.

They had broken into the Kremlin in order to see the boy who was now
Czar, so that they might be sure that his stepmother had not hidden him
away, as the rumor went, in order that her own son Peter might have the
throne for himself. But once inside the Kremlin many of the soldiers
devoted themselves to pillage, until the ringleaders raised the cry,
"Where is the Czar Iva