RALEIGH'S MINOR WORKS

59

Raleigh is credited with several minor publications, usually of political or ethical character, some of which are certainly spurious. The most important of these which may be regarded as genuine are Maxims of State and The Prorogation of Parliament, both written during his captivity in the Tower, and Advice to a Son, worldly wise but pitched in the very lowest key of feeling. There is nothing immoral or exactly reprehensible, but the observations on wedlock, for example, are exactly such as might have confirmed Shakespeare in his resolution

to bequeath his wife his second best bed. It is remarkable that, until Rousseau's influence became potent, not a single writer from Bacon to Chesterfield was able to counsel the young without in some measure lowering his own reputation with posterity.

As a poet Raleigh belongs to the class of wits, of whom he is one of the first and best examples in our literature. Destitute of "the vision and faculty divine," he has esprit, the power of expressing himself with point and liveliness upon anything that has for the moment captivated his interest.

Hence, in the pieces of his that have been preserved, he appears almost exclu-
sively in the character of an occasional poet. He would probably stand
higher but for the loss of his one sustained effort, the Cynthia. Even this
was prompted by Elizabeth's disfavour, but the allegorical scheme must
have made large demands upon his fancy and constructive faculty. The
fragment remaining can convey no just idea of the general character of the
poem, and is, moreover, in a most unpolished state. Passages, however, show
that it wants neither dignity of thought nor of expression :-

If to the living were my muse addressed,
Or did my mind her own sprite still inhold;

Raleigh as a

Poet

Were not my living passion so repressed,

As to the dead the dead did them unfold.

Some sweeter words, some more becoming verse,
Should witness my mishap in higher kind.—
But my love's wounds, my fancy in the hearse,
The idea but resting of a wasted mind,

The blossoms fallen, the sap gone from the trees,
The broken monuments of my great desires-
From these so lost what may the affections be,
What heat in cinders of extinguished fires ?

No doubt, however, Raleigh's special field in the domain of poetry was occasional verse, "the casual brilliance of a mind in constant activity." His intimacy with Marlowe had been sufficiently close to draw upon him the imputation of free-thinking, and when Marlowe produced his delightful lyric pastoral, “Come, live with me, and be my love," it was natural for Raleigh to respond in this half-serious half-mocking strain :—

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures well might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

But time drives flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complain of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields.
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy buds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last, and youth still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee and be thy love.

It should be remarked that the authorship of many lyrics ascribed to Raleigh is not entirely certain. None were printed as his in his lifetime, except complimentary verses prefixed to his friends' books. Several are attributed to other writers in MS. copies, and his editor, Dr. Hannah, has eliminated twenty-five on sufficient grounds. The reply to Marlowe, however, appears sufficiently authenticated not only by the friendship of the poets but by the testimony of Izaak Walton; and if it is Raleigh's, so must be the

equally celebrated lyric Passions, which displays the same intellectual brightness and nimbleness. The complimentary verses are, of course, genuine, and if Raleigh had written nothing but the sonnet prefixed to Sir Arthur Gorges' Lucan he would have proved his ability to achieve a grave and stately strain. It is the more interesting as Gorges had served under Raleigh in the voyage of 1597, of which he was also the historian, and because, being written in the Tower in 1614, it is fraught with an undercurrent of reference to Raleigh himself:

Had Lucan hid the truth to please the time,

He had been too unworthy of thy pen,

Who never sought nor ever cared to climb

By flattery or seeking worthless men.

For this thou hast been bruised, but yet those scars

Do beautify no less than those wounds do,

Received in just and in religious wars;

Though thou hast bled by both, and bearest them too.
Change not! to change thy fortune 'tis too late;

Who with a manly faith resolves to die

May promise to himself a lasting state,

Though not so great, yet free from infamy;

Such was thy Lucan, whom so to translate,
Nature thy Muse like Lucan's did create.

If poems have been attributed to Raleigh without warrant, it is also possible that poems really by him circulated without his name. This may perhaps be the case with the graceful lines to Cynthia, Raleigh's poetical name for his royal mistress, lamenting the withdrawal of her favour, printed in Dowland's Music Book of 1597, even though in a copy found in an album of James I.'s time and translated by Goethe and printed in the correspondence of Thomas Lovell Beddoes the initials appended are not W. R. but W. S. It is such a piece as Raleigh might well have composed, and its elegant finish seems to indicate a practised hand :

My thoughts are winged with hopes, my hopes with love;
Mount, Love, into the Moon in clearest night,

And say, as she doth in the heaven move,

In earth so wanes and waxes my delight;

And whisper this but softly in her ears,

How oft Doubt hang the head and Trust shed tears.

And you, my thoughts that seem mistrust to carry,
If for mistrust my mistress do you blame,
Say, though you alter yet you do not vary,
As she doth change and yet remain the same.
Distrust doth enter hearts but not infect,
And love is sweetest seasoned with suspect.
If she for this with clouds do mask her eyes,
And make the heavens dark with her disdain,
With windy sights' disperse then in the skies,
Or with thy tears dissolve them into rain.
Thoughts, hopes, and love return to me no more,
Till Cynthia shine as she hath done before.

1 Sighs so written to avoid collision with "skies."

Raleigh's place in the literature of England resembles that of Cæsar in the literature of Rome-that of a well-nigh universal genius, excellent alike in prose and verse, who might have attained the highest place in the former at least if the man of letters had not with him been subordinate to the man of action. It says much for the era of Elizabeth that so brilliant a personage should at the same time be so much the man of his age. For this he is great, rather than for his adventurous exploits or his literary performances; even though these suffice to place him in the leading rank of both the doers and the writers of his time.

CHAPTER II

THE LESSER LIGHTS OF ELIZABETHAN PROSE

characteristics

age

In our last chapter, with some violence to strict chronological accuracy, we Special have treated of the four great prose-writers of the Elizabethan and, in the of the case of two of them, of the Jacobean era also, who stand forth conspicuously from the contemporary throng. These eliminated, we discern the better the affluence of the period in literary talent when we perceive how much remains after so vast a deduction. There is hardly any department without some representative with merit sufficient to have brought him down to our day as a writer to be remembered, and even consulted on other accounts than his relation to his time, or as an illustration of contemporary manners or of the progress of the language: and this after abstracting the poetry and drama which, apart from the four great writers considered separately, invest the age with its most signal literary distinction. The age of Elizabeth is as much in advance of that of Henry VIII. as this was of the fifteenth century. Tennyson has admirably characterised the special distinction of the Elizabethan age by a single epithet, "The spacious times of great Elizabeth." The world had grown wider everywhere, but most of all in England. England was better able than any other country to take advantage of the three great events which had so vastly expanded the intellectual horizon, the revival of classical literature, the publication of the Scriptures in the vernacular, and the discovery of the New World. The impulse communicated by the first of these was indeed common property, but Protestant countries alone could profit by the second, and no Protestant country but England and Holland could take advantage of the third. Had England not embraced the Reformation, she could have had no justification for those wars in the Low Countries and those expeditions to the Spanish Main which probably contributed more than anything else to kindle the national imagination to the point at which all enterprise, whether of a material or intellectual order, seems the fulfilment of manifest destiny. The extravagance of the inferior writers, no less than the grandeur of the higher, attests the prevalent temper of animation and excitement. The æther was ampler, the air diviner than of yore; the fields alike of action and of thought were indeed "invested with purpurealgleams."

The era of Elizabeth was thus one of those, of which human history counts Its general some six or seven, in which the mind of man was suddenly expanded by being picturesqueintroduced to a more extensive area, whether through the operation of con

ness