Title to "Sir celalter Ralegh's History of the World."

From death and dark oblivion (near the same),
The mistress of man's life, grave history,
Raising the world to good or evil fame,
Doth vindicate it to eternity.

High Providence would so, that nor the good

Might be defrauded, nor the great secur'd;

But both might know their ways are understood,
And the reward and punishment assur'd.

This makes, that lighted by the beamy hand

Of truth, which searcheth the most hidden springs,
And guided by experience, whose straight wand
Doth mete, whose line doth sound the depth of things;
She cheerfully supporteth what she rears,
Assisted by no strengths but are her own;
Some note of which each varied pillar bears,
By which, as proper titles, she is known,
Time's witness, herald of antiquity,
The light of truth, and life of memory.

THE JUDGMENTS OF THE ALMIGHTY.

"To repeat God's judgment in particular, upon those of all degrees which have played with His mercies, would require a volume apart; for the sea of examples hath no bottom. The marks set on private men, are with their bodies cast into the earth, and their fortunes written only in the memory of those that lived with them, so as those that succeed, and have not seen the fall of others, do not fear their own faults. God's judgments upon the great and greatest have been left to posterity-first, by those happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided; and secondly, by their virtue who have gathered the acts and ends of men mighty and remarkable in the world. Now to point far off, and to speak of the conversion of angels into devils for ambition; or of the greatest and most glorious kings, who have gnawn the grass of the earth with beasts for pride and ingratitude towards God; or of that wise-working of Pharaoh, when he slew the infants of Israel, ere they had recovered their cradles or of the policy of ezebel, in covering the murder of Naboth by a trial of the elders, according to law, with many thousands of the like: what were it other than to make an hopeless proof that far-off examples would not be left to the same far-off respects, as heretofore? For, who hath not observed what labour, practice, peril, bloodshed, and cruelty the kings and princes of the world have undergone, exercised, taken on them, and committed, to make themselves and their issues masters of the world? And yet hath Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Syria, Macedon, Carthage, Rome, and the rest, no fruit, no flower, grass, nor leaf, springing upon the face of the earth, of those seeds. No, their very roots and ruins do hardly remain. Omnia quæ manu hominum facta sunt, vel manu hominum evertuntur, vel stando et durando deficiunt: 'All that the hand of man can make, is either overturned by the hand of man, or at length, by standing and continuing, consumed.' The reasons of whose ruins are diversely given by those that ground their opinions on second causes. All kingdoms and states have fallen (say the politicians) by outward and foreign force, or by inward negligence and dissension, or by a third cause arising from both. Others observe, that the greatest have sunk down under their own weight, of which Livy hath a touch: eo crevit, ut magnitudine laboret

sua: others, that the divine providence (which Cratippus objected to Pompey) hath set down the date and period of every estate before their first foundation and erection. But hereof I will give myself a day over to resolve.

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For, seeing the first books of the following story have undertaken the discourse of the first kings and kingdoms; and that it is impossible for the short life of a preface, to travel after and overtake far-off antiquity and to judge of it, I will, for the present, examine what profit hath been gathered by our own kings, and their neighbour princes, who having beheld, both in divine and human letters, the ill success of infidelity, injustice, and cruelty, have notwithstanding planted after the same pattern.

"True it is, that the judgments of all men are not agreeable, nor (which is more strange) the affections of any one man stirred up alike with examples of like nature. But every one is touched most with that which most nearly seemeth to touch his own private, or otherwise best suiteth with his apprehension. But the judgments of God are for ever unchangeable; neither is He wearied by the long process of time, and won to give His blessing in one age to that which He hath cursed in another. Wherefore those that are wise, or whose wisdom, if it be not great, yet is true and well grounded, will be able to discern the bitter fruits of irreligious policy, as well among those examples that are found in ages removed far from the present, as in those of latter times. And that it may no less appear by evident proofs than by asseveration, that ill-doing hath always been attended by ill success, I will here, by way of preface, run over some examples, which the work ensuing hath not reached.

"Among our kings of the Norman race, we have no sooner passed over the violence of the Norman Conquest, than we encounter with a singular and most remarkable example of God's justice upon the children of Henry I. For that king, when both by force, craft, and cruelty, he had dispossessed, overreached, and lastly made blind, and destroyed his elder brother, Robert Duke of Normandy, to make his own sons lords of this land, God cast them all, male and female, nephews and nieces (Maud excepted), into the bottom of the sea, with above an hundred and fifty others that attended them; whereof a great many were noble, and of the king dearly beloved.

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