The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours.”
The country was at peace; and every peaceful art and pursuit prospered. As one sign of the great prosperity and outstretching enterprise of commerce, we should note the foundation of the East India Company on the last day of the year 1600. The reign of James I. (1603-1625) was also peaceful; and the country made steady progress in industries, in commerce, and in the arts and sciences. The two greatest prose-writers of the first half of the seventeenth century were Raleigh and Bacon; the two greatest poets were Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
[2.] Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618).—Walter Raleigh, soldier, statesman, coloniser, historian, and poet, was born in Devonshire, in the year 1552. He was sent to Oriel College, Oxford; but he left at the early age of seventeen to fight on the side of the Protestants in France. From that time his life is one long series of schemes, plots,
adventures, and misfortunes—culminating in his execution at Westminster in the year 1618. He spent “the evening of a tempestuous life” in the Tower, where he lay for thirteen years; and during this imprisonment he wrote his greatest work, the History of the World, which was never finished. His life and adventures belong to the sixteenth; his works to the seventeenth century. Raleigh was probably the most dazzling figure of his time; and is “in a singular degree the representative of the vigorous versatility of the Elizabethan period.” Spenser, whose neighbour he was for some time in Ireland, thought highly of his poetry, calls him “the summer’s nightingale,” and says of him—
“Yet æmuling[18] my song, he took in hand
My pipe, before that æmulëd of many,
And played thereon (for well that skill he conn’d),
Himself as skilful in that art as any.”
Raleigh is the author of the celebrated verses, “Go, soul, the body’s guest;” “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet;” and of the lines which were written and left in his Bible on the night before he was beheaded:—
“Even such is time, that takes in trust