Of the “Poly-olbion,” the edition called the second, of 1622, has fetched an excessive price; while the first, considered incomplete, may be procured at a very moderate price. The possessor of the first edition, however, enjoys the whole treasure of Selden’s lore. Mr. Southey, in his “Specimens of Our Ancient Poets,” has reprinted the entire “Poly-olbion” with his usual judgment; but, unhappily, the rich stores of Selden the publishers probably deemed superfluous. Drayton is worthy of a complete edition of his works.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF RAWLEIGH.
Rawleigh is a great name in our history, and fills a space in our imagination. His military and maritime genius looked for new regions, to found perhaps his own dominion. Yet was this hero the courtier holding “the glass of fashion,” and the profound statesman—whose maxims and whose counsels Milton, the severe Milton, carefully collected—and the poet, who, when he found a master-genius lingering in a desert, joyed to pay him the homage of his protection. Rawleigh, who, in his youthful hours, and even through his vagrant voyages, was at all times a student, in the ripeness of his knowledge was a sage. Thus he who seemed through all his restless days to have lived only for his own age, was the true servant of posterity.
If ever there have been men whose temperaments and dispositions have harmonized within themselves faculties seemingly incompatible, with an equability of force combining the extremes of our nature, it would not be difficult to believe that Sir Walter Rawleigh was one of this rarest species. Various and opposite were his enterprises, but whichever was the object his aptitude was prompt; for he is equally renowned for his active and his contemplative powers; in neither he seems to have held a secondary rank. And he has left the nation a collection of his writings which claim for their author the just honours of being one of the founders of our literature.
This is the perspective view of his character as it appears at a distance; his was a strange and adventurous life! the shifting scenes seem gathering together as in a tale of fiction, full of as surprising incidents, and as high passions, and as intricate and mysterious as the involutions of a well-invented fable. And in this various history of a single individual should we be dazzled by the haughtiness of prosperity, and even be startled by the baseness of humiliation, still shall we find one sublime episode more glorious than the tale, and as pathetic a close as ever formed the catastrophe of a tragic romance. I pursue this history as far as concerns its psychological development.
It was the destiny of Rawleigh to be the artificer of his own fortunes, and in that arduous course to pass through pinching ways and sharp turns. The younger son of a family whose patrimony had not lasted with their antiquity, he had nothing left but his enterprise and his sword; his mind had decided on his calling. The romantic adventures of the Spanish in new regions had early kindled the master-mind which takes its lasting bent from its first strong impulse. The Spaniards and their new world, “the treasures and the paradises” which they enjoyed, haunted his dreams to his latest days. The age in which the great struggle had commenced in Europe for the independence of nations and of faiths, was as favourable to the indulgence of the military passion as it was pregnant with political instruction. No period in modern history was so prodigal of statesmen and of heroes; and Rawleigh was to be both.
Two noble schools for military education were opened for our youthful volunteer: among the Protestants in France, when they assembled their own armies, and subsequently in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange, Rawleigh learned the discipline of a valorous but a wary leader, and beheld in Don John of Austria the hardihood of a presumptuous commander, whose “self-confidence could overcome the greatest difficulties, yet in his judgment so weak, that he could not manage the least.”
The captain who had fleshed his sword in many a field, now cast his fortunes in that other element which led Columbus to discovery, and Pizarro to conquest. Rawleigh had an uterine brother, whom he justly called his “true brother,” Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a great navigator, and the projector of a new passage to the Indies; an expedition was fitted out by them to colonise some parts of North America; his first maritime essay was frustrated by a disastrous accident. But the intrepid activity of Rawleigh allowed no pause, and now it turned against the rebellious kerns of Ireland. His disputes with Grey, the Lord-deputy, brought them before the council-board in the presence of the queen. Our adventurer knew how to value this fortunate opportunity. His eloquent tale struck his lordly adversary dumb, and was not slightly noticed by Elizabeth. The soldier of fortune was now hanging loosely about the circle of the court, watchful of another fortunate moment to attract the queen’s attention. There was a very remarkable disposition in this extraordinary man, as I have elsewhere noticed, of practising petty artifices in the affairs of life. The gay cavalier flung his rich embroidered mantle across the plashy spot for an instantaneous foot-cloth, not unknowing that an act of gallantry was sure to win the susceptible coquetry of his royal mistress. His personal grace, and his tall stature, and the charm of his voluble elocution when once admitted into the presence, were irresistible. On the same system as he had cast his mantle before the queen, he scratched on a window-pane likely to catch her majesty’s eye that verse expressive of his “desire” and “his fear to climb,” to which the queen condescended to add her rhyme.