Of a character so exalted and a genius so varied, how has it happened that Gibbon, who had once intended to compose the wondrous tale of his life, has pronounced his character to be “ambiguous;” and that Hume has described it as “a great, but ill-regulated mind?”[14]
The story of Rawleigh is a moral phenomenon; but what is there that moves in the sphere of humanity, of which, when we discover the principle of action, we cannot calculate even the most eccentric movements? Rawleigh from the first was to be the architect of his own fortunes; this was a calamity with him, for a perpetual impulse was communicated to the versatility and the boundless capacity of a genius which seemed universal. Soldier and sailor, sage and statesman, he could not escape from the common fate of becoming the creature of circumstance. What vicissitudes! what moral revelations! How he disdained his enviers! His towering ambition paused not in its altitude; he reached its apex, and having accomplished everything, he missed all! He whose life is a life of adventure, who is now the daring child of fortune, and falls to be the miserable heir of misfortune, though glory sometimes disguises his recklessness, is doomed to be often humiliated as well as haughty.
The favourite of his sovereign, thrown amid the contending suitors of a female Court, we have found creeping in crooked politics, and intriguing in dark labyrinths. Rawleigh met his evil genius in Cecil; he saw his solitary hope vanish with Prince Henry. Awakening his last energies with the juvenile passion of his early days, he pledged his life on a new adventure—it was his destiny to ascend the scaffold. He was always to be a victim of state. The day of his trial and the hour of his death told to his country whom they had lost. From the most unpopular man in England he became the object of the public sympathy, for they saw the permanent grandeur of the character, when its lustre was no longer dusked by cloudy interests or temporary passions.
There is no object in human pursuits which the genius of Rawleigh did not embrace. What science was that unwearying mind not busied in? What arts of hoar antiquity did he not love to seek? What sense of the beautiful ever passed transiently over his spirit? His books and his pictures ever accompanied him in his voyages. Even in the short hour before his last morning, is he not still before us, while his midnight pen traces his mortuary verse, perpetuating the emotions of the sage, and of the hero who could not fear death.[15]
Such is the psychological history of a genius of the first order of minds, whom posterity hails among the founders of our literature.
[1] Lodge’s “Illustrations of British History,” iii. 67.
[2] Sidney Letters, ii. 45.
[3] When Rawleigh was himself in the place where he had put Essex—on the scaffold, he solemnly declared that “he had no hand in his blood, and was none of them that procured his death.” How are we to reconcile this declaration with the extraordinary letter which first appeared in Murdin’s Collection, and which Hume asserts “contains the strongest proofs to the contrary?”—Mr. Lodge understands the advice of Rawleigh in the very worst sense; Mr. Tytler, with ingenuity, suggests that Cecil, with “a prospective wariness, which—not satisfied with deceiving his contemporaries—provided blinds for posterity,” procured Rawleigh to address this letter to him; and, in a word, that, in composing this energetic epistle, he was not so much the writer as the agent in the plot. I am more disposed to believe that when Rawleigh wrote so remarkable a letter, he was fully aware of its import, and looked forwards to the result.