Two others were Walter Warner, who is said to have suggested to Harvey the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, and Robert Hues, famed for his “Treatise on the Globes.” These, with Hariot, were the earl’s constant companions; and at a period when science seemed connected with necromancy, the world distinguished the earl and his three friends as “Henry the Wizard, and his three Magi.” We may regret that no Symposia have come down to us from this learned society in the Tower, which we may consider as the first philosophical society in our country. All these persons, eminent in their day, appear to have written in their various departments, and were inventors in science; yet few of their works have passed through the press. This circumstance is a curious evidence in our literary history, that in that day the studious composed their works without any view to their publicity; the difficulty of obtaining a publisher for any work of science might also have conduced to confine their discoveries to their private circle. Some of these learned men probably were uncouth writers; Dee never could end a sentence in his rambling, confused style. Many of these works, scattered in their forlorn state of manuscript, often fell into hands who appropriated them to their own purpose. Even Hariot’s treatise, which furnished Descartes with a new idea of the science, was a posthumous publication by his friend Warner, merely to secure a continuance of the pension which had been granted to him by the Earl of Northumberland.
These philosophers appear to have advanced far into their inquiries, for they were branded by atheism or deism. What therefore has reached us coming from ignorant or prejudiced reporters will not satisfy our curiosity. Of Hariot, Wood tells that “he always undervalued the old story of the creation of the world, and could never believe the trite position ex nihilo nihil fit. He made a philosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament, so that consequently the New would have no foundation. He was a deist, and his doctrine he did impart to the Earl of Northumberland and to Sir Walter Rawleigh, when he was compiling his ‘History of the World.’ He would controvert the matter with eminent divines, who therefore having no good opinion of him, did look on the matter of his death as a judgment for nullifying the Scriptures.” Hariot died of a cancer on his lip.
From such accounts we can derive no knowledge of the philosophical theology of Hariot. He was the philosopher, however, who went to Virginia with the design of establishing a people of peace, with the Bible in his hand. He taught those children of nature its pure doctrines till they began to idolise the book itself, embracing it, kneeling to it, and rubbing their bodies with it. This new Manco Capac checked this innocent idolatry, but probably found some difficulty in making them rightly comprehend that the Bible was but a book like any other, made by many hands; but that the spiritual doctrine contained in it was a thing not to be touched nor seen, but to be obeyed. Such a philosopher, could he have remained among these Indians, would have become the great legislator of a tribe of primitive Christians; and as he actually contrived to construct an alphabet for them, this seems to have been his intention.
The doctrines of Hariot, which Wood has reprobated, certainly were not infused into the pages of Rawleigh; his divinity is never sceptical; his researches only lead to speculations purely ethical and political—what men have done, and what men do.[10]
Such were the men of science, daily guests in the Tower during the imprisonment of Rawleigh; and when he had constructed his laboratory to pursue his chemical experiments, he must have multiplied their wonders. With one he had been intimately connected early in life; Hariot had been his mathematical tutor, was domesticated in his house, and became his confidential agent in the expedition to Virginia. Rawleigh had earnestly recommended his friend to the Earl of Northumberland, and Sion House in consequence became for Hariot a home and an observatory.
The scholastic Dr. Burhill is supposed to have been one among the learned friends whose assistance in his Hebraic researches Rawleigh acknowledges. It was such a student that might have led Rawleigh into his singular discussion on the site of paradise. One great name has claimed the tracings of his hand in the “History of the World.” Ben Jonson has positively told that he wrote a piece on the Punic wars, which Rawleigh “altered and set in his book.” The verses prefixed to the “Mind of the Frontispiece” are Jonson’s. There was an intimacy between Jonson and Rawleigh which appears to have been interrupted, and this may possibly have given occasion to the remarkable sharp stricture from Jonson, in his conversation with Drummond, that “Rawleigh esteemed more fame than conscience; the best wits in England were employed in making his ‘History of the World.’”
Rawleigh, in his vast and recondite collection of criticism and chronology, would enrich his volume with the stores accumulated from the sources of brother-minds; it is even said that he submitted his composition to Serjeant Hoskyns, that universal Aristarchus of that day, at whose feet, to use the style of honest Anthony, all poets threw their verses;[11] but the most material characteristic of his work Rawleigh could borrow from no one—the tone and elevation of his genius.
But if the “History of the World” instructed his contemporaries, there was a greater history in his mind, which had secured the universal acceptance of posterity—the history of his own times. But the age of Elizabeth, in manuscript, might be an act of treason in the court of James the First, in the eyes of his redoubted rival Cecil; he who did not wholly escape from malicious applications in writing the history of the world that had passed away, eluded the fatal struggle with contemporary passions. He has himself acquainted us of this loss to our domestic political history: “It will be said by many that I might have been more pleasing to the reader if I had written the story of mine own times, having been permitted to draw water as near the well-head as another. To this I answer, that whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth. There is no mistress or guide that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries. He that goeth after her too far off, loseth her sight and loseth himself; and he that walks after her at a middle distance, I know not whether I should call that kind of course, temper or baseness.”[12]
The miscellaneous writings of Rawleigh are so numerous and so various, that Oldys has classed them under the heads, poetical, epistolary, military, maritime, geographical, political, philosophical, and historical.[13]