the second son of his father's third wife, and so the universal accident of birth seems in his case to be intensified. It was the sixth year of Edward VI.'s reign, and an astrologer has noted that year as "a year remarkable in our chronicles, first, for that strange shoal of the largest sea-fishes which, quitting their native waters for fresh and untasted streams, wandered up the Thames so high, till the river no longer retained any. brackishness; and, secondly, for that it is thought to have been somewhat stained in our annals with the blood of the noble Seymer, Duke of Somerset-events surprisingly analogous both to the life of this adventurous voyager, Sir Walter Ralegh, whose delight was in the hazardous discovery of unfrequented coasts, and also to his unfortunate death." It is not possible to determine exactly the effect of these largest "sea fishes" on his after-life; their coming may have been mere coincidence, or it may have been that the same element of an unknown power that sent the fishes hurrying to untasted streams, made Ralegh restless as the fish. The point lends itself to straining by its nature, though it is staidly mentioned by the staid biographer who has been quoted. The dominating influence of his life was not the date of his birth, but his birthplace in the quiet of the country, and yet within the easiest reach of the fabulous outside world. That influence cannot be exaggerated. Old sailors, who, as young men, had sailed with Jaques Carthier, of St. Malo, must have stirred the boy's mind with the stories of their adventures up the river of Canada to Saguenay, where there was gold and silver and red copper; how they visited the town of Hochelaga, their captain very gorgeously attired; and how, when their guides had led them to the midst of the town, they were saluted by the women first and then by the men; and a comedy was rehearsed for their amusement until, borne on ten men's shoulders, Agouhanna, the lord and king of the country, wearing the skins of red hedgehogs in place of a crown, was brought in and placed by the side of their captain, on a great stag's skin; and how their captain, seeing the people's misery, read them in a loud, clear voice the first chapter of St. John's Gospel. Tales, too, young Ralegh would hear of other wild men and of their prodigious wealth, which they knew not the value of; of rubies and of pearls bartered for iron and toys; of the great creatures morses or sea-oxen, "which fish is very big, and hath two great teeth, and the skinne of them is like Buffe's leather, and they will not go away from their young ones." And at Bristol was living Mr. Alexander Woodson, an excellent mathematician and skilful physician, and he, writes Hakluyt, "shewed me one of these beast's teeth which were brought from the isle of Ramea in the first prize, which was half a yard long or very little less; and assured mee that he had made tryall of it in ministring medicine to his patients, and had found it as soveraigne against poyson as any Unicornes horne." With only a little less eagerness and a wiser discrimination between fact and fable would the elders of the great Devonshire families, with many of whom the Raleghs were connected, hear the news and plan schemes for outwitting their rivals on the sea-the Spaniards—and perhaps foresee the great part their sons would play in gaining for their country prestige in this unclosing of the outside world. They would spare no pains to make the youngsters worthy to carry on the great tradition of Devonshire gentlemen under the splendid new conditions, which were daily becoming more apparent. A fine stock were the Devonshire gentlemen who watched over the years of Walter Ralegh's boyhood, whetting no doubt by their interest his keenness in Latin and Greek, in fencing and riding, and training his knowledge of men. Among the Gilberts and Champernounes and Raleghs and Carews, there would be men as skilful in the handling of a ship as in the proper management of a farm, and to all would young Ralegh listen with his mind feverishly alert for information, and from all he would learn what each could teach him. Old John Hooker, who lived at Exeter, and helped to write the continuation of Holinshed's chronicle, knew the boy and took an interest in him; as is easy to see from his proud reference to the Raleghs' illustrious descentroyal even he would have it in despite of Sir William Pole-and from his fine warning to young Ralegh when he was emerging into distinction to remain worthy of it. "These all," he writes, "were men of great honour and nobility whose virtues are highly recorded sparsim in the Chronicles of England. But yet, as nothing is permanent in this life and all things variable under the sun, and Time hath devoured and consumed greatest men and mightiest monarchs and most noble communities in the world-according to the old country saying, 'Be the day never so long, yet at length it will ring to even-song' -so this honourable race. . . continued in great honour, nobility and reputation, yet in process of time seemed at length to be buried in oblivion. "Now it hath pleased God to raise the same even from the dead. . . . And whereof cometh this that the Lord hath so blessed you, but only that you should be beneficial and profitable to all men?" And he ends his discourse, in which a note of almost fatherly concern is heard, with an apt euphuism about the bee, to clinch his argument and perhaps to show his knowledge of courtly style (did not he too go to London as member for Exeter?) "As the bee is no longer suffered to have a place in the hive than whiles he worketh, no more is that man to have place in the public weal than whiles he doth some good therein." His father, too, was a man to know and appreciate his son's worth. He had led no uneventful life, though he was, for the most part, sequestered in the country. He took a leading part in the affairs of the little town of Budleigh-Salterton. In the great Rising of the West, in 1549, he came perilously near to losing his life. He was riding with some mariners from Hayes to Exeter, when he came upon an old woman telling her beads; he stopped to ask her why she defied authority by telling beads, and the old woman, furious, rushed into the church of Clyst St. Mary, and inveighed against the gentlemen who would burn the houses of poor folk over their heads. Ralegh had ridden on towards Exeter; a body of insurgents overtook him, and he was saved from being murdered only by hastening into a chapel by the roadside. But he went on his way again, and again fell into the hands of the rebels; and this time he did not manage to escape, but was shut up in the tower of a church at St. Sidwell's-a suburb of Exeter in the hands of the rebels-until Lord Grey of Wilton won the great battle of Clyst Heath, in which four thousand perished, and relieved the siege of Exeter. The incident serves to show the calibre of the father. But when young Ralegh was a boy, his father's adventurous days were over; and in 1561 he is mentioned as churchwarden of East Budleigh parish, and no doubt led his family regularly each Sunday to the family pew, on which the family arms are still discernible, |