Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.”
Let it not, therefore, be imagined, from the foregoing instances, that every Greco-Roman Nose indicates an energetic statesman, or a literary monarch; or that the same actions are to be predicated from the same form of Nose in different men under different circumstances.
Energy and refinement may exist in every department of life. The peasant may furnish as illustrious an example of either as the Prince. But what a King has, these heroes want; and so they die unhonoured for lack of a record. The illustrations are, therefore, necessarily drawn from the high and mighty of various spheres.
Stars of lesser magnitude, however, present themselves to shed a further light upon the subject.
Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney were two men whose characters exhibited many points of identity.
In any arduous enterprize which promised fame and honour, Sir Walter Raleigh was always prominent. Eager to support the Reformation, he served in the Protestant army as a volunteer during the civil wars in France, and afterwards tendered his services to the Netherlands in their contest with Spain for civil and religious liberty. One of the most attractive enterprizes of the reign of Elizabeth to men of energy and forethought was, however, that presented by the recently-opened field of American discovery. Into this Raleigh threw himself heart and soul. With his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, he made the then perilous voyage to the New World, but failed to establish a firm footing on its shores.
Still he was not to be thus foiled. After a careful consideration of the best authorities, he came to the just conclusion that there was land north of the Gulf of Florida, a tract then wholly unexplored. Having obtained from the Queen the inexpensive grant of all he might discover, be it sea or be it land, be it inhabited or be it void, he fitted out vessels of discovery; and, though not permitted by the wary Queen to accompany them himself, they verified his predictions by discovering the country now called Virginia—a name which the virgin Queen herself bestowed upon it.
But it was not by his energy that Raleigh alone distinguished himself. The young Protestant volunteer, and the American adventurer would long since have been forgotten among a host of compeers, had not he presented far higher claims to the notice of posterity. “Raleigh was one of those rare men who seem qualified to excel in all pursuits alike; and his talents were set off by an extraordinary laboriousness, and capacity of application. (I
II). As a navigator, soldier, statesman, and historian, his name is intimately and honourably linked with one of the most brilliant periods of British history.”[[18]]
Sir Walter Raleigh occupies a distinguished place in literature, both as a poet and an historian. It is probable that only a small portion of his poetry has come down to us. He seems to have regarded it but lightly himself, and many very beautiful pieces, which there is no reason to doubt owe their origin to his creative brain, are without name, and only preserved in some obscure miscellaneous collections, under the modest signature ‘Ignoto.’ One of these, sometimes entitled “The Lie,” and sometimes “The Soul’s Errand,” is as beautiful, as Christian, and as philosophic a poem as any in the language; yet so little pains did he take to secure to himself the literary fame of the words with which he had relieved his labouring soul, that it has been attributed to divers poetasters, and, among others, to that most wretched inharmonious scribe, Joshua Sylvester.