seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond
Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to _The Lotus
Eaters_, and the first _Legende des Siecles_ rejected as unreadable. In
face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it
is on its head or its feet--"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels,"
as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only be found
in an incessant exploration of the by-ways of literary history and
analysis of the vagaries of literary character. To pursue this analysis
and this exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice is to
sum up the pleasures of a life devoted to books.

_August 1919._

THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN[1]

Three hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir Walter Raleigh was
beheaded, in presence of a vast throng of spectators, on the scaffold of
Old Palace Yard in Westminster. General Gordon said that England is what
her adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English history a
more shining and violent specimen of the adventurous type than Raleigh.
I am desired to deliver a brief panegyric on this celebrated freebooter,
and I go behind the modern definition of the word "panegyric" (as a
pompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to its original significance,
which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a great assembly of persons,
of the reason why they have been brought together in the name of a man
long dead. Therefore I shall endeavour, in the short space of time
allotted to me, not so much to eulogise as to explain and to define what
Sir Walter Raleigh was and represents.

I suggest, therefore, before we touch upon any of the details of his
career and character, that the central feature of Raleigh, as he appears
to us after three hundred years, is his unflinching determination to see
the name of England written across the forehead of the world. Others
before him had been patriots of the purest order, but Raleigh was the
first man who laid it down, as a formula, that "England shall by the
favour of God resist, repel and confound all whatsoever attempts
against her sacred kingdom." He had no political sense nor skill in
statecraft. For that we go to the Burghleys or the Cecils, crafty men of
experience and judgment. But he understood that England had enemies and
that those enemies must be humbled and confounded. He understood that
the road of England's greatness, which was more to him tha