LIFE OF RALEGH.*—[SECOND Konen.] Euzaarrn had died, and a new

king had arisen who knew not Ralegh, while fancying he knew him only too well. Cowardice was ingrained in James's nature, and he feared with the fear which is next of kin to hate the man who offered "to raise two thousand men at his own expense and risk, and to invade the Spanish terri tory at their head without any preliminary burthen to the Royal Exchequer." What was the crafty Stuart, with his blundering, tortuous policy, to do with a man who feared neither perils by the sea nor perils by the land, but whose eyes and intellect were wide open to see that England's honour should not suffer in either ?

There were not wanting bitter enemies who, through personal dislike of Ralegh, or envy of his place and power, lost no opportunity of poisoning the King's mind against him. Some of these men Mr.

Edwards has photographed under the white light of an amount of evidence strong enough to consume the mass of hearsay stories which have too commonly passed for history in all that concerns

these years of bitter intrigue. Lord Henry Howard stands before us condemned out of his own mouth and on the testimony of his own letters ; while Cecil, still " toiling terribly " as ever for his country's weal, yet in his greed for

power succumbs to the baseness, not indeed, as has been said, of plotting against Ralegh's life, but of employing Howard as a tool at his friend's expense, to keep him from power. In all the plots and counter-plots against James, all evidence brought against Ralegh falls to the ground. But some of the accusations brought against him in 1603 read strangely side by side with the King's own words in 1604. In 1603 he is accused of conspiring with Cobham and Count Arenbergh against the King, actuated by greed of the bribe of Spanish gold which Arenbergh could offer.

On this ground, Coke can tell the man the best years of whose life, and 40,000 marks of whose fortune, have been spent in combating the power of Spain, when on his trial, "Thou bast a Spanish heart, and art a spider of hell." Now, as our author observes :—

" It is obvious that in the course of 1603 one of these two things had taken place : either, on the one hand, Arenbergh had betrayed every duty of an ambassador ; or else, on the other, the character given, in the trials at Winchester, to the intercourse carried on—with the alleged complicity of Ralegh—between Arenbergh and Cobham, was a piece of deliberate political falsehood of the most infamous sort. The knavery of Arenbergh underlies, of necessity, the treason charged against Cobham. Whatever the guilt of Cobham in any other respect, his indictment falls to the ground, unless Arenbergh had betrayed his duty, both to the master he served and to the King to whom he was accredited. What, then, is the character given to Arenbergh, by James and his ministers, after all stress of diplomatic reserve and diplomatic subtlety had ended ? 'We thank you most affectionately.' writes James to the Archduke Albert, in August, 1604, for the sincerity and affection you have shown yourself to bear towards the conclusion of this peace and friendship, by the choice you have made of such worthy and eminent instruments as are our Cousin, the Prince Count of Arenbergh . . . . [and his colleague], who by their sufficiency, prudence, and integrity, hare so conducted this important affair that we have received therein very great satisfaction.' "

The trial of Ralegh, given as fully as was practicable within defined limits, is amongst the most interesting of these pages. Probably no reader in the present day would rise from its perusal without endorsing the statement made afterwards by one who was himself a judge on that memorable day, "That the justice of England has never been so injured and degraded as by the condemnation of Sir Walter Ralegh." Perhaps, too, as in imagination we stand among the auditors who listen to Ralegh's reply, we understand the force of the passage Mr. Edwards has so aptly quoted elsewhere,—" The enemies which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." But Ralegh's career was not yet run. As we all know, James had his own scheme to carry out. Spain must be propitiated, and the body of Ralegh alone could close the gulf of enmity between the two countries. Spain was little likely to forgive the man who had struck so fatal a blow at her power in Cadiz, and made her quail in her colonial possessions before the English flag. James, even while sacrificing him, took care she should know the value of the man who, for her sake, he was about to execute ; but even a Stuart could not inaugurate his reign by the death of such a man as Ralegh so he goes to the Tower, there for twelve years to await the King's pleasure.

Perhaps, on the whole, after the first few months of anguish, they were by no means the unhappiest of his life. He had much in those first hours to regret, but treason did not form a part ; the hour for which he most despised himself was that in which, with undue humility and eagerness, he implored his life of the King. Mr. Edwards is no special pleader for his hero ; Ralegh in his eyes is strong enough to bear all evidence against him, and he sternly, we think too sternly, blames him here. "The urgency of his suit," he says, "was very unbefitting. To beg life so humbly accorded as little with his bearing throughout the trial as with the work and

• service he had done for his country." And the thought of it, he adds, "when his mind regained its tone, came to be more bitter than the thought of death." At the moment when death seemed to have drawn very near, he wrote to Lady Ralegh, "Get those letters, if itbe possible, which I wrote the Lords, wherein I sued for my life. God .knowathat it was for you and yoursIdesirecl it,but it is true Idisdain myself for begging it." Few men living in this day can enter into or understand Ralegh's strong clinging to life. Few have as much to leave as he ; he,had made his life full, and "the little done had well nigh vanished from the mind that forward saw how much remained to do." He had the work of half-a-dozen lives on his hands ; it was agony to perish, and leave it all half done. But a little while, and the teeming brain brought forth worthy fruit in the prison, as it had done in the palace. The History of the World remains the invaluable bequest of those silent hours, with many a pamphlet full of political wisdom which came to be remembered in after days. It was long before the voice of Ralegh was silent in Parliament. "During the great debates of the Carolinian Parliaments," writes Mr. Edwards, "Ralegh made many a posthumous speech. In the Grand Remonstrances' and Petitions of Right he helped in the framing of many an important clause." He was eminently fitted to become an historian. He had himself, as our author says, helped to make a good deal of history. He had looked into the multitude with as sharp an insight as that with which he had ever looked into a privy councillor Hispaniolized, or into a plethoric West Country merchant bent at any price on escaping the payment of one farthing beyond the extreinest minimum of subsidy." And he knew (few men better),

But in the master mind of one who sways them."

He was well aware of the rocks and shoals in his way. Mr. Edwards has given us a paragraph of Defoe's in which he, by force of far other circumstances, comes to the conclusion which Ralegh has diffused throughout his preface. "If," says Defoe, "an impartial writer resolves to venture upon the dangerous precipice of telling unbiassed truth, let him proclaim war with mankind after the fashion of Poland,—neither to give nor take quarter. If he tells the crimes of great men, they fall upon him with the iron hands of the law. If he tells their virtues. . . . then the mob attacks him with slanders. But if he regards Truth, let him

' expect martyrdom on both sides,—and then he may go on fearless."

• And our author adds, if Ralegh went on fearless, it was because he could truly say, in the closing words of Defoe's pregnant paragraph, "it is the course I take myself." Our attention, too, is called to the delicate process, in which Ralegh was by no means unskilled, of fitting antique shoulders with modern heads. Doubtless contemporaries could recognize many a picture, when even at the distance of more than two hundred years the resemblance of some is not wholly obliterated from a nation's memory.

But in the Court of James I. there was a thirst deeper even • than the thirst for Ralegh's blood. When years before he had returned from the ill-fated Guianan Expedition, he had named the gold mine Keymis had discovered ; he revived the subject now, and it became at once the " sesame " to open hts prison doors. Under strictest orders to find the mine and bring back gold, he set out on his last expedition. The history of that voyage is familiar as a twice-told tale to the veriest tyro in English history ; it is no small.merit that Mr. Edwards has contrived by the fullness of his details, traced with a touch at once light and firm, to invest the aubject with new interest. We stand once more by Ralegh's side in those few short days of respite from anxiety amounting almost to despair which be passed at Gomera, and wait with him as he holds his interview with Harry the Indian, and watch his face as he writes to Lady Ralegh, "My name hath still lived among them ;" but there were but few and fitful gleams of light in that dreary time, and soon all was shrouded in darkness. His young son fell by the hand of the Spaniards while prosecuting with Keymis the search for the mines. It was the undoing of the expedition. The hour that comes once, upon every man of higher • or nobler nature than his fellows, had come to Keymis, and he did not come off victor in that wrestling-match. The faithful man had followed his master's fortunes to the last, and knowing, no man better, how far Ralegh's fame, fortune, nay, very life, depended on the finding of that mine, of the existence of which few knew so surely as Keymis himself, he had faced danger and death to win for Ralegh the guerdon. And now young Ralegh was dead, and the Spaniards and their Indians were making deadly inroads on their scanty numbers. Within a few hours' march of the mine, near Seiba, Keymis turned back :—" The most resolute men," says Mr. Edwards, "have their moments of

discouragement. The most faithful men feel at some conjuncture or other,—for a brief interval, and against their own better nature and firmest convictions,--as if it were as well and much easier to turn their faces to the wall at once, rather than to push on, enduring to the end." The man who can comprehend that sentence has room in his nature to pity Keymis. To Ralegh his captain's weakness was his own death-knell. " You must answer it to the King and State," was Ralegh's verdict ; but "before they parted Keymis had passed sentence on himself."

Little more remained. Gondomar had been active in London. Ralegh's bitter enemy, he had made his execution the condition of Spanish acquiescence in James's schemes. "Serve us in this, and we will serve you by and by," was the burden of his intercourse with the English King. "To promote a match abhorrent to the affections and the faith of his people, James had devoted the greatest of living Englishmen to the block. And he had directed that the eminence and capacity for service of the man he had sacrificed should be pressed on the attention of the Court of Spain, as a measure of his eagerness to gratify it. Between the resolve and the execution, King James spent some of the hours unoccupied by field sports in writing Meditations on the Lord's Prayer."

False witnesses were easy to suborn, Stukely and Dlanourie could be cheaply bought, and the highest intellect in James's Court had sold his soul for place and power. With short warning, "for they feared the people," Ralegh was hurried to the block ; but men were looking on at that execution "destined to be foremost and unrelenting both in hatred to Spain and in hostility to the House of Stuart. Some of them lived long enough to stand hard by the same spot on another winter's morning, yet some thirty years distant, as witnesses of another political execution. Among the most careful students of Ralegh's history were John Eliot, John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell, and John Milton, names not without significance. If "the greatest gift a hero leaves his race is to have been a hero," then it is no small service rendered to that race if he find a biographer able by much patient toil to rescue his memory from the fables which may overlay it. This Mr. Edwards has done, and the reader has before him not alone the fullest possible record of Ralegh's life, but many invaluable documents which will go far to clear away the mists which too often hang over the period in which he lived.