CH. VIII.

1491

tations.

What hath he lost that such great grace hath won?
Young years for endless years, and hope unsure
Of fortune's gifts for wealth that still shall dure:
O happy race, with so great praises run!

He had as light a touch. He understood how to play with a
conceit till it glances and dances and dazzles, as in his, for
probably it is his, Grace of Wit, of Tongue, of Face, and in Fain
would I, but I dare not. Praed was not happier in elaborate
trifling than he in his Cards and Dice. Prior might have envied
him The Silent Lover. His Nymph's Reply to the Passionate
Shepherd, if it be his, as Izaak Walton without suspicion as-
sumes, and, if it did not compel comparison with Marlowe's
more exquisite melody, would assure his place among the
poets of the age. He was able to barb a fierce sarcasm with
courtly grace. How his fancy could swoop down and strike,
and pierce as it flashed, may be felt in each ringing stanza of
The Lie-

Say to the Court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the Church, it shows
What's good, and doth no good:

If Church and Court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

His fancy could inspire in his Pilgrimage one of the loftiest appeals in all literature to Heaven from the pedantry of human justice or injustice. He could match Cowley in metaphysical verse, as in A Poesy to prove Affection is not Love. But the Their Limi- Court spoilt him for a national poet, as it spoilt Cowley; as it might, if it had been more generous, have spoilt Dryden. He desired to be read between the lines by a class which loved to think its own separate thoughts, and express its own separate feelings in its own diction, sometimes in its own jargon. He hunted for epigrams, and too often sparkled rather than burned. He was afraid not to be witty, to wrangle, as he himself has said,

In tickle points of niceness.

Often he refined instead of soaring. In place of sympathising

he was ever striving to concentrate men's regards on himself. CH. VIII. Egotism is not inconsistent with the heat of inspiration, when it is unconscious, when the poet sings because he must, and bares his own heart. Ralegh rarely loses command of himself. He is perpetually seen registering the effects his flights produce. Apparently he had no ambition for populàr renown as a poet. He did not print his verses. He cannot be said to have claimed any of them but the Farewell to the Court. His authorship of some, now admitted to be by him, has been Disputed Authorship. confidently questioned. A critic so judicious as Hallam, for reasons which he does not hint, and a student as laborious as Isaac D'Israeli, have doubted his title to The Lie, otherwise described as The Soul's Errand, which seems to demonstrate his authorship by its scornful and cynical haughtiness embodied in a wave of magnificent rhythm. Verses, instinct with his peculiar wit, like The Silent Lover, have been given away to Lord Pembroke, Sir Robert Ayton, and others. Its famous stanza

Silence in love bewrays more woe

Than words, though ne'er so witty;
A beggar that is dumb, you know,
Deserveth double pity!

was in the middle of last century boldly assigned to Lord Chesterfield. His compositions circulated from hand to hand at Court. They were read in polished coteries. So little did they ever become a national possession that, complete or incomplete, the most considerable of them has vanished, all but a fragment. Small as is the whole body of verse attributed to him, not all is clearly his. Dr. Hannah, and other ardent admirers of his muse, have been unable to satisfy themselves whether he really wrote False Love and True Love, with its shifting rhythm, and its bewitching scattered phrases; the Shepherd's fantastically witty Description of Love, or Anatomy of Love

It is a yea, it is a nay;

CH. VIII. or the perfect conceit, which Waller could not have bettered in wit or equalled in vivacity, with the refrain—

What care I how fair she be !

Twenty-seven other poems, among them, the bright sneering Invective against Women, have been put down to him on no other ground than that they cannot be traced to a different source. He might have been the author of the graceful Praise of his Sacred Diana. He might have sighed for a land devoid of envy,

Unless among

The birds, for prize of their sweet song.

From him might have come the airy melody of the charming eclogue Phyllida's Love-call to her Corydon, which invites the genius of a Mendelssohn to frame it in music. He might have penned in his prison cell the knell for the tragedy of human life, De Morte. He might have been the shepherd minstrel of the flowers

You pretty daughters of the earth and sun.

But, unfortunately, the sole pretext for affirming his title, as the editors of the 1829 collection of his works affirmed it, is that the poems are found in the Reliquiae Wottonianae, in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, or in England's Helicon, and are there marked 'Ignoto.'

The assignment, often, as Mr. Bullen shows in his editions of England's Helicon, and A Poetical Rhapsody, without the slightest authority or foundation, of poetic foundlings of rare charm and distinction to Ralegh is a token of the prevalent belief in the unfathomed range of his powers. At the same time it implies that he had never been adopted, and Carelessness identified, by the contemporary public specifically as a Renown. poet. He would not be discontented with the degree and

of Literary

kind of the poetic fame conceded to him. Had he coveted more he would have been at more pains to stamp his verses. His poetic gift he valued merely as a weapon in his armoury, like many others. It held its own and a more

important place in his career. Imagination, which might have CH. VIII. made a poet, elevated and illuminated the captain's and the courtier's ambition and acts. If it put him at a disadvantage in a race for power with a Robert Cecil, it carried him to Guiana, and gave him the palm in the glorious struggle at the mouth of Cadiz harbour; it inspired him in the more tremendous strife with judicial obliquity; it supported him on the scaffold in Palace Yard.

G

CHAP. IX.

CHAPTER IX.

THE REVENGE. (September, 1591.)

LONG after Ralegh began to be recognized in his new circle as a poet, he first showed himself a master of prose diction. The occasion came from his loss of an opportunity for personal distinction of a kind he preferred to literary laurels. The hope and the disappointment alike testify that, whatever had been the Queen's demeanour in 1589, she frowned no longer in 1591. Essex's temporary disgrace, on account of his marriage with Lady Sidney in 1590, had improved Ralegh's prospects. So much in favour was he that, in the spring of 1591, he had been commissioned as Vice-Admiral of a fleet of six Queen's ships, attended by volunteer vessels and provision boats. Lord Thomas Howard, second son of the Duke of Norfolk beheaded in 1572, commanded in chief. The object of the expedition was to intercept the Spanish plate fleet at the Azores. Ralegh's Sir Richard cousin and friend, the stern and wayward but gallant Sir Richard Grenville, finally was substituted for him. There is no evidence that the change was meant for a censure. Much more probably it was a token of the Queen's personal regard. sent with the squadron his ship, the Ark Ralegh, under the command of Captain Thynne, another of his innumerable connexions in the West. The English had to wait for the plate galleons so long at the Azores that news was brought to Spain. A fleet of fifty-three Spanish sail was despatched as convoy. Ralegh was engaged officially in Devonshire. The Council directed him in May to send off a pinnace to tell Howard that this great Spanish force had been descried off Scilly.

Grenville.

He