Perhaps no one in English history better represents the heroic character than
Sir Walter Raleigh,
for Sidney has got
to be almost as shadowy as
Arthur himself.
Raleigh’s somewhat antique and Roman virtues appear in his numerous
military and naval adventures, in his knightly conduct toward
the Queen,
in his poems and his employments in
the Tower, and not
least in his death, but more than all in his constant soldier-like bearing
and promise. He was the
Bayard
of peaceful as well as war like enterprise, and few lives which are the
subject of recent and trustworthy history are so agreeable to the
imagination. Not withstanding his temporary unpopularity, he especially
possessed the prevalent and popular qualities which command the admiration of
men. If an English
Plutarch were to be
written, Raleigh would be the best Greek or Roman among them all. He was one
whose virtues if they were not distinctively great yet gave to virtues a
current stamp and value as it were by the very grace and loftiness with which
he carried them; — one of nature’s noblemen who possessed those
requisites to true nobility without which no heraldry nor blood can avail.
Among savages he would still have been chief. He seems to have had, not a
profounder or grander but, so to speak, more nature than other men — a
great, irregular, luxuriant nature, fit to be the darling of a people. The
enthusiastic and often extravagant, but always hearty and emphatic, tone in
which he is spoken of by his contemporaries is not the least remarkable fact
about him, and it does not matter much whether the current stories are true
or not, since they at least prove his reputation. It is not his praise to
have been a saint or a seer in his generation, but
“one of the gallantest worthies that ever England bred. ”
The stories about him testify to a character rather than a virtue. As, for
instance, that
“he was damnable proud.
Old Sir Robert Harley of Brampton-Brian Castle
(who knew him) would say, it was a great question, who was the
proudest. Sir Walter or
Sir Thomas
Overbury, but the difference that was, was judged on Sir Thomas’s
side;” that
“in his youth his companions were boisterous blades, but generally those that had wit;”
that on one occasion he beats one of them for making a noise in a tavern, and
“seals up his mouth, his upper and nether beard, with hard wax.
A young contemporary
says, “I have heard his enemies confess that he was one of the
weightiest and wisest men that the island ever bred;” and
another
gives this character of him — “who hath
not known or read of this prodigy of wit and fortune, Sir Walter Raleigh, a
man unfortunate in nothing else but in the greatness of his wit and
advancement, whose eminent worth was such, both in domestic policy, foreign
expeditions, and discoveries, in arts and literature, both practic and
contemplative, that it might seem at once to conquer example and
imitation.
