There are none now in Phoenicia, that lament the death of Adonis; nor any in Libya, Creta, Thessalia, or elsewhere, that can ask counsel or help from Jupiter. The great god Pan hath broken his pipes; Apollo’s priests are become speechless; and the trade of riddles in oracles, with the devil’s telling men’s fortunes therein, is taken up by counterfeit Egyptians, and cozening astrologers.”

In his Discourse of War in General (commencing with almost a heroic verse, “The ordinary theme and argument of history is war,”) are many things well thought, and many more well said. He thus expands the maxim that corporations have no soul: “But no senate nor civil assembly can be under such natural impulses to honor and justice as single persons.… For a majority is nobody when that majority is separated, and a collective body can have no synteresis, or divine ray, which is in the mind of every man, never assenting to evil, but upbraiding and tormenting him when he does it: but the honor and conscience that lies in the majority is too thin and diffusive to be efficacious; for a number can do a great wrong, and call it right, and not one of that majority blush for it. Hence it is, that though a public assembly may lie under great censures, yet each member looks upon himself as little concerned: this must be the reason why a Roman senate should act with less spirit and less honor than any single Roman would do.”

He then in the same treatise leaps with easy and almost merry elasticity from the level of his discourse to the heights of his philosophy: “And it is more plain there is not in nature a point of stability to be found; every thing either ascends or declines: when wars are ended abroad, sedition begins at home, and when men are freed from fighting for necessity, they quarrel through ambition.”

And he thus concludes this discourse: “We must look a long way back to find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition.

“It would be an unspeakable advantage, both to the public and private, if men would consider that great truth, that no man is wise or safe, but he that is honest. All I have designed is peace to my country; and may England enjoy that blessing when I shall have no more proportion in it than what my ashes make!”

If his philosophy is for the most part poor, yet the conception and expression are rich and generous.

His maxims are not true or impartial, but are conceived with a certain magnanimity which was natural to him, as if a selfish policy could easily afford to give place in him to a more universal and true.

As a fact evincing Raleigh’s poetic culture and taste, it is said that, in a visit to the poet Spenser on the banks of the Mulla, which is described in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, he anticipated the judgment of posterity with respect to the Faerie Queene, and by his sympathy and advice encouraged the poet to go on with his work, which by the advice of other friends, among whom was Sidney, he had laid aside.