age of battle with the limelight full
upon him. The classic writing of the crisis is contained in the _Last
Fight of the Revenge at Sea_ of 1591, where the splendid defiance and
warning of the Preface are like trumpets blown to the four quarters of
the globe. Raleigh stands out as the man who above all others laboured,
as he said, "against the ambitious and bloody pretences of the
Spaniards, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall be themselves
devoured."

There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I do not present
Raleigh to you as a humble-minded man. In that wonderful Elizabethan age
there were blossoming, side by side, the meekness of Hooker, the
subtlety of Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbable
wisdom of Shakespeare. Raleigh had no part in any of these, and to
complain of that would be to grumble because a hollyhock is neither a
violet nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractors
ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He
was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to
excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual
alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself
that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak,"
and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation of his
courage and nobility. For long years his violent and haughty temper made
him the most unpopular man in England, except in Devonshire, where
everybody doted on him. He was "a man of desperate fortunes," and he did
not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life we are amused, we
are almost scandalised, at his snake-like quality. He moves with
serpentine undulations, and the beautiful hard head is lifted from
ambush to strike the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his
protestations, his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive
pertinacity, Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the "strong
silent" type of soldier which the nineteenth century invented for
exclusive British consumption.

In judging his character we must take into consideration not only the
times in which he lived, but the leaders of English policy with whom he
came into collision. He was not thirty years of age, and still at the
height of his vivacity, when he was taken into the close favour of Queen
Elizabeth. There can be no question that he found in the temper of the
monarch something to which h