SOURCE: "The Prose," in Sir Walter Ralegh, Longmans, Green and Co, 1953, pp. 127–71.

The profuseness and variety of Ralegh's prose writings are formidable. As a naval commander, he sends an excited account of a great battle to a friend; for his son he inscribes some rather heavy-handed paternal advice; he translates excerpts from a Sceptic philosopher; he extols the virtues of Guiana as a colony; he composes a treatise on the art of war at sea; from the Tower he gives a monarch advice on the disposing of his children in marriage, writes a tract on parliamentary government, and over the long years sets forth his sombre philosophy of history in his story of man from his beginnings to the days of the Roman Empire. The reader may well be daunted by such diversity of material, much of it written for occasions and purposes that have now no interest, much of it fragmentary, and some of it, alas, very dull. The prose is not very accessible, either, to the general reader: the last edition of the Works was in 1829, and the selections from the prose that are available suffer from the disadvantages of all anthologies. The purpose of this [essay] is to sort out for the reader, with the help of liberal quotation, what is important and valuable among the mass of Ralegh's writings in prose.

I shall not exhibit strings of passages as particularly fine specimens of English prose-style: a collocation of eloquent paragraphs set down for the reader to admire would be as useless as the detached 'beauties' of Shakespeare. In prose as in verse, it is vain to consider style as a thing in itself. Form depends on function, and how good the form, or style, of a passage is, cannot be judged until we take the whole work into account, examine its aim and intention and see what part the passage plays in fulfilling that aim. I shall concern myself with what Ralegh has to say and how effectively he says it.

In the first place, Ralegh's prose must be divided into two kinds: the prose of action, and the prose of reflection. Within these two divisions will be found many different types of writing, answering the needs of particular works, but this first separation is fundamental.

The Prose of Action

The prose of action comprises accounts of actions or exploits in which Ralegh took part or had a particular interest. This type of literature is one we know well enough today, but Ralegh's reasons for writing were generally very different from the reasons of those who today publish stories of personal adventure and unusual excitements. Ralegh never thought of the writing-up of his actions as a 'literary' endeavour or an attempt to make capital from the public's desire for vicarious adventure—nor did he undertake exploits in order to write books about them. Some of his 'prose of action', for example, is embedded in his historical writing, where it serves for illustration and comparison; accounts of his last fatal expedition were written as memoranda or private letters in his own justification; the Discovery of Guiana was written to enlist approval and support for a colonial scheme.

The earliest piece is Ralegh's first published work in prose and concerns an action in which he took no part: A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of Azores this last Summer, Betwixt the Revenge, one of Her Majesty's Ships, and an Armada of the King of Spain (1591). To appreciate how good this account of Grenville's heroic foolhardiness is, the reader should turn, after sampling it, to the ballad which Ralegh's account inspired Tennyson to write on the subject. Tennyson, substituting a rather jaunty bravado for the spirit that moves Ralegh, and writing up the story in verse, loses the ready appeal which Ralegh's direct and unadorned relation has. Ralegh's heart and style go together; both heart and style are a little uneasy in Tennyson, and they are out of step. Ralegh knows that the tale of Grenville's astonishing 'greatness of heart' in defying impossible odds is so impressive that the deeds are best left to speak for themselves, with as little elaboration and indirection as possible.

The spirit behind the work is, like the style, simple and without subtlety. Ralegh is moved by admiring wonder at a course of action quite impolitic and inexpedient, foredoomed to failure, which, because it humiliated an arrogant and evil enemy, deserved to be called not folly but heroism. Ralegh loves Grenville's courage and resolution 'never to submit or yield' in a cause sanctified as a good cause. The love and wonder make his account glow with enthusiasm. 'The other course had been the better', he says—to have got out of the way when the Spanish fleet bore up—'notwithstanding, out of the greatness of his mind, he could not be persuaded.' Ralegh tells quickly and vividly how the little English fleet was caught at anchor and unready, the ships' companies halved by disease and many men ashore; how Grenville in the Revenge 'utterly refusing to turn from the enemy' sailed into the midst of the two Spanish squadrons; how he was laid aboard by ship after ship in turn, but fought them all off, inflicting heavy losses, through the afternoon and night until he himself was wounded and his ship had become a hulk, and all that flesh and blood could do to resist had been done….

The celebration of Grenville's pertinacity and courage was only a part of Ralegh's purpose in writing his narrative; the pamphlet is also designed as a blow in the anti-Spanish campaign, in support of Ralegh's policy of aggression. So the action of the Revenge is set within an account of recent happenings in the war and is accompanied by general reflections on the Spanish menace. Ralegh reminds his readers with some satisfaction of the fate of Spanish imperialist designs in 1588, when the invincible Armada was 'driven with squibs from their anchors and chased out of the sight of England'. Grenville's fight is a moral victory in the cause so near to Ralegh's heart. But his hostility to Spain as he here expresses it is not a jingoistic and truculent one. The emphasis is everywhere on defence against being engulfed by a cruel and irreligious imperialism rather than on attack against a rival power. Ralegh's indignation at the barbarities practised by the Spaniards in the Indies and Peru, under the cloak of spreading faith amongst the heathen, rings with a sincere and genuine tone.

The other naval action of which Ralegh has left an account is the engagement at Cadiz (seen by Ralegh as revenge for the Revenge)…. The account, not published in his lifetime, is given in a letter to an unnamed friend and is born of an entirely different spirit from the account of the Revenge; the difference is reflected in the markedly different style. There is a boyish exuberance about it all, like the zest of a fighter-pilot; the description of how Essex called out 'Entramos' and 'cast his hat into the sea for joy' is typical of the mood of the whole. The mood has its dangers: it may descend into a cocksure bravado, an unjustified contempt for the enemy and a delight in battle for its own sake. The only time Ralegh actually oversteps the mark is at the very end when his lust for loot and his spite at not being able to satisfy that lust are very apparent. In general, one is more impressed by the very real daring and skill that lie behind the racy narrative.

The letter wonderfully conveys Ralegh's excitement. Take the unusually vivid images, for example: 'They hoped to have stumbled the leading ship', I was first saluted by the fort called Philip', I bestowed a benediction amongst them', I laid out a warp by the side of the Philip to shake hands with her', 'The Flemings … used merciless slaughter till they were by myself and afterwards by my Lord Admiral beaten off. The sheer energy of the account is remarkable. The sense of immediacy and participation is brought to the reader far more vividly than in most eye-witness narratives, yet Ralegh is no war-correspondent but a leading participant, fully and hotly engaged in the business of the battle and concerned in his report only to tell his correspondent just what happened. Here is an extract from the extraordinary description of the final plight of the Spanish Galleons:

They all let slip and ran aground, tumbling into the sea heaps of soldiers, so thick as if coals had been poured out of a sack, in many ports at once—some drowned and some sticking in the mud. The Philip and the St. Thomas burned themselves; the St. Matthew and the St. Andrew were recovered by our boats ere they could get out to fire them. The spectacle was very lamentable on their side, for many drowned themselves; many, half-burned, leapt into the water; very many hanging by the ropes' ends by the ships' side under the water even to the lips; many, swimming with grievous wounds, strucken under water and put out of their pain; and, withal, so huge a fire, and such tearing of the ordnance in the great Philip and the rest when the fire came to them, as if any man had a desire to see Hell itself, it was there most lively figured.

In such a passage, we can see that the thrill of the romance and glory of war is not the whole of Ralegh's attitude and that the utter disenchantment with war which finds expression in The History of the World and the Discourse of the Cause of War is perhaps born of a very real and personal knowledge of the suffering to the unoffending that is brought by the ambitious schemes of contending States.

Other naval and military adventures of his own, or that he heard from the lips of participants, are scattered about the History, where they are used for comment of various kinds—the assault on Fayal during the Islands Voyage (V, I, ix) illustrating the theory that it is easier to assault a coast than to defend it. These accounts are too fragmentary, however, to be discussed on their own.

There is no doubt that much of the appeal of Ralegh's 'prose of action' for the modern reader is that it gives us an easy entry into the heart of that unique world of Elizabethan maritime adventure—the Armada, Drake, the North-West passage, Hakluyt. Whether or no it is true that the sea is in the Englishman's blood, writings about the sea are: he thrills all the more to discovery, exploration and sea-battles when he has not to endure the hard-lying and scanty fare that inevitably attend them. Ralegh is a superb dispenser of Elizabethan adventure, and that without striving for effect. The plain statement of facts which opens his Discovery of Guiana captures the glamour of voyaging to far-off and little-known lands in a way an historical novelist might well envy:

On Thursday the 6 of February in the year 1595, we departed England, and the Sunday following had sight of the north cape of Spain, the wind for the most part continuing prosperous; we passed in sight of the Burlings and the Rock, and so onwards for the Canaries, and fell with Fuerte Ventura the 17 of the same month, where we spent two or three days and relieved our companies with some fresh meat. From thence we coasted by the Gran Canaria, and so to Tenerife, and stayed there for the Lion's Whelp, your Lordship's ship, and for Captain Amyas Preston and the rest; but when after 7 or 8 days we found them not, we departed and directed our course for Trinidado with mine own ship and a small barque of Captain Cross's only (for we had before lost sight of a small gallego on the coast of Spain which came with us from Plymouth). We arrived at Trinidado the 22 of March, casting anchor at Point Curiapan, which the Spaniards call Punto de Gallo, which is situate in 8 degrees or thereabouts; we abode there 4 or 5 days, and in all that time we came not to the speech of any Indian or Spaniard: on the coast we saw a fire, as we sailed from the point Carao towards Curiapan, but for fear of the Spaniards, none durst come to speak with us.

…..

Although it is true, and Ralegh excuses himself for it, that he has 'neither studied phrase, form nor fashion', The Discovery of Guiana is not simply a straightforward journal of events. He wanted to advertise the virtues of Guiana as a colony, and blended with direct description are passages of deliberate eloquence painting as attractive a picture as possible to the English reader who might have capital for investment. The 'earthly-paradise' passages … are very skilfully done and are a tribute to Ralegh's art rather than to the unconscious poetry in the soul of an explorer. However, the work stands by the freshness and vividness of its reporting rather than by Ralegh's powers of persuasion; it is in fact because it is a travel book without the literary vices of most travel books that it is so fine a literary work. The images have the spontaneity of a gay fancy: 'flowers and trees of that variety as were sufficient to make ten volumes of herbals'; along the river where tribes lived in tree-houses his boat grounded 'and stuck so fast as we thought that even there our discovery had ended and we must have left sixty of our men to have inhabited like rooks upon trees with those nations'; the marvellous crystal mountain was like 'a white church tower of exceeding height' and the torrent that dashed down it 'falleth to the ground with a terrible noise and clamour, as if a thousand great bells were knocked one against another'.

It is pathetic indeed to turn from the optimistic and eager narrative of the promise of Guiana to the wretchedness of Ralegh's various accounts of the utter failure of the 1618 expedition…. Here is different prose indeed; at times strained, hectic and disordered, but at times of great nobility, when Ralegh's spirit rises in passion against the injustice he has received or when, in the simplest words, despair records despair…. The "Apology" for his voyage is of course not at all in the same category with other 'prose of action' since it is less an account than an argument in self-justification. Though the language stutters at times with indignation and bitterness, it has its own distinction: Ralegh was almost incapable of writing badly. Is it so strange, he writes, that he should have failed in his enterprise 'being but a private man and drawing after me the chains and fetters wherewith I had been thirteen years tied in the Tower'? The long-drawn-out cadences carry the sense onwards though syntax is lost in the eagerness with which he writes:

A strange fancy had it been in me to have persuaded my son, whom I have lost, and to have persuaded my wife to have adventured the eight thousand pounds which His Majesty gave them for Sherborne, and when that was spent to persuade her to sell her house at Mitcham, in hope of enriching them by the mines of Guiana, if I myself had not seen them with my own eyes; for being old and sickly, thirteen years in prison and not used to the air, to travail and to watching, it being ten to one that I should ever have returned, and of which by reason of my violent sickness and the long continuance thereof no man had any hope, what madness would have made me undertake this journey, but the assurance of the mine?

The Prose of Reflection

The miscellaneous works of 'reflection' are an arid field: they do not increase our respect for Ralegh as a writer or a thinker though they show the breadth of his interests. The political writings are tedious, derivative and inconsistent. The Prince or Maxims of State and The Cabinet Council (the manuscript of which came into the hands of Milton, who published it) cannot be considered as original writings, so heavily do they rely on other authors, and as both the matter and the manner are uninteresting they may be left to the specialist in Renaissance political theory and the influence of Machiavelli on English thought. A more lively piece of political theory is The Prerogative of Parliaments in England, written during Ralegh's last years in the Tower and addressed to the King. Framed as a dialogue between a Counsellor of State and a Justice of the Peace, its retailing of constitutional history is enlivened by the disagreement of the protagonists and sharpened by the contemporary references and anecdotes which Ralegh intersperses. Ralegh has been attacked for being too much on the side of absolute monarchy, and Stebbing quite rightly defends him on the grounds that a Tudor courtier could not help looking at the monarchy with different eyes from those of the Long Parliament. He points out that Ralegh's tract was actually written to persuade the King to call a Parliament, and was far too much to the 'left' in tone for the pleasure of James's court. It is the Justice of the Peace who is given the better of the argument all along, as he defends the acts of Parliament throughout its history, sticks up for its rights and assures his opponent that Crown and Parliament are each other's helpmeets rather than antagonists. A note of adulation and deference to the King and his rights it would be extraordinary not to find in a work of persuasion addressed to His Majesty: Ralegh's candid opinion of monarchs can be seen in The History of the World where tact and diplomacy do not inhibit him as they do here—as when for example the Justice warns the Counsellor not to 'dig out of the dust the long-buried memory of the subjects' former contentions with the King'. 'What mean you by that?' asks the Counsellor. I will tell your Lordship when I dare', comes the answer. It is worth mentioning in passing that this work shows a far greater understanding of the dynamics of social and political change than all the pieces Ralegh translated from Italian theorists: 'The wisdom of our own age is the foolishness of another: the time present ought not to be referred to the policy that was but the policy that was to the time present: so that the power of the nobility being now withered and the power of the people in the flower, the care to content them would not be neglected.'

The style of the work calls for little comment: there is considerable variety, from the colloquial exchanges like this, on Richard II:

Yet you see he was deposed by Parliament.

As well may your Lordship say he was knocked on the head by Parliament,

to such heavy Old Testament rhythms as in:

Nay, my Lord, so many other goodly manors have passed from His Majesty as the very heart of the kingdom mourneth to remember it, and the eyes of the kingdom shed tears continually at the beholding it: Yea, the soul of the kingdom is heavy unto death with the consideration thereof.

Other advice that the King received from his temerarious prisoner related to the proposed double match of Prince Henry and his sister with a princess and prince of the House of Savoy. Though Ralegh is always deferential when he speaks directly to James, the tone of the whole is very much man-to-man, and some of the implications are not exactly discreet, as, for example, when he speaks in disgust of the callousness of Kings in using their children as pawns in political chess. Both tracts—Ralegh wrote one opposing each of the two suggested marriages—are readable and convincing. Ralegh demonstrates the impolicy and uselessness of any alliance with Savoy, and hostility to Spain is the leit-motiv of his song—'It is the Spaniard that is to be feared: the Spaniard, who layeth his pretences and practices with a long hand.'

The way in which Ralegh tenders advice to his monarch is very unlike the way in which he lectures his own family. We could wish on the whole that Ralegh had not written his Instructions to his Son and to Posterity. Here is a Polonius indeed (but a really strongminded Polonius, whose advice is decidedly instruction) laying down the law on friendship, marriage, conduct, servants, economy, drink. The trouble with the instruction given is not that it is always faulty or over-prudent, but that the motivating spirit is worldly, politic and calculating. The very first chapter, on the choice of friends, is unpleasant in its cunning and its eyeing of the main chance. Friendships are never to be struck up with those who are poorer or inferior in rank because those friends will pursue the relationship for mercenary ends only, but 'let thy love be to the best so long as they do well; but take heed that thou love God, thy country, thy Prince and thine own estate before all others.' Or again, 'Take also special care that thou never trust any friend or servant with any matter that may endanger thy estate.'

The almost fanatic concern for the preservation of one's estate inspires all along the more repellent axioms. The words about the settlement one ought to make for one's wife are so remarkable that they should be given in full:

Let her have equal part of thy estate whilst thou livest, if thou find her sparing and honest, but what thou givest after thy death, remember that thou givest it to a stranger, and most times to an enemy; for he that shall marry thy wife will despise thee, thy memory and thine, and shall possess the quiet of thy labours, the fruit which thou hast planted, enjoy thy love and spend with joy and ease what thou hast spared and gotten with joy and travail. Yet always remember that thou leave not thy wife to be a shame unto thee after thou art dead, but that she may live according to thy estate … But howsoever it be, or whatsoever thou find, leave thy wife no more than of necessity thou must, but only during her widowhood, for if she love again, let her not enjoy her second love in the same bed wherein she loved thee, nor fly to future pleasures with those feathers which Death hath pulled from thy wings, but leave thy estate to thy house and children in which thou livest upon earth whilst it lasteth.

The strange absence of any note of charity, love, liberality or self-lessness is again impressive in a warning against borrowing and lending and standing surety. Take care, he says, 'that thou suffer not thyself to be wounded for other men's faults and scourged for other men's offences—which is, the surety for another, for thereby millions of men have been beggared and destroyed, paying the rockoning of other men's riot … If thou smart, smart for thine own sins, and, above all things, be not made an ass to carry the burdens of other men: if any friend desire thee to be his surety, give him a part of what thou hast to spare. If he press thee further, he is not thy friend at all.'

The end and aim of all the advice is self-interest. To see love of God conjoined with love of one's own estate, tempts us to think that the persuasion to godliness is but perfunctory and that Mammon is the real object of worship. And nowhere is there even lip-service paid to the other great commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself. But although the worldly wisdom of the homilies is suffocating, it is to be remembered that these injunctions are hardly intended by Ralegh to lay bare his 'philosophy of life'. Like some of Bacon's essays they have a limited end and narrow sphere of operation: they are specially designed as a guide to social behaviour in a particular social environment. In addition, it cannot be denied that a good deal of the advice is at least prudent and sensible and right-minded (though never great-hearted). The 'great care to be had in the choosing of a wife' has its moments as an essay in prose on the theme of 'conceit begotten by the eyes'. Even here, however, selfishness creeps in: he advises his son to take more care that his wife loves him 'rather than thyself besotted on her', but 'be not sour or stern to thy wife, for cruelty engendreth no other thing than hatred.'

It would be interesting to know how the Instructions were complied; they often seem to bear the stamp of a man who has just been stung by a disappointment or a piece of treachery and in his immediate mortification makes a note in his commonplace book to warn others. 'If thou trust any servant with thy purse, be sure thou take his account before thou sleep.' It would also be interesting to know the date of composition, and whether the style was at all influenced by Bacon's Essays. 'Speaking much, also, is a sign of vanity; for he that is lavish in words is a niggard in deeds … He that cannot refrain from much speaking is like a city without walls and less pains in the world a man cannot take, than to hold his tongue.' But the style in general has the tone of the Hebrew prophet: some quotation from the chapter on 'what inconveniences happen to such as delight in wine' may serve to illustrate this and conclude the discussion of the work:

A drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness, for the longer it possesseth a man, the more he will delight in it, and the older he groweth, the more he shall be subject to it, for it dulleth the spirits and destroyeth the body as ivy doth the old tree and as the worm that engendreth in the kernel of the nut.

Take heed, therefore, that such a cureless canker pass not thy youth, nor such a beastly infection thy old age, for then shall all thy life be but as the life of a beast and, after thy death, thou shalt only leave a shameful infamy to thy posterity, who shall study to forget that such a one was their father.

The difficulty with many of Ralegh's miscellaneous writings is that they hardly seem to be self-contained or completed works, or that they have perhaps been put together to serve some special purpose we know nothing about. The Sceptic is a translation from Sextus Empiricus, and we can only glean from other writings of Ralegh how far it is to be taken as representing his own views. The Treatise on the Soul one can hardly discuss at all without more knowledge. Strathmann, who calls it 'a summary of conventional beliefs', is not entirely certain of its authenticity; he suggests it may be rather an abstract of another work than an independent essay. It is certainly difficult to know what should have induced Ralegh to compose it, if he did. The modern reader who perseveres with the little treatise may feel the same impatience with the discussion that Ralegh himself felt with Ironside's attempts to define the nature of the soul.

No such lack of individuality marks a piece of a very different kind indeed, an essay on war, probably only in draft form or perhaps a fragment of a larger projected work, first printed in 1650 with the title A Discourse of the Original and Fundamental Cause of Natural, Customary, Arbitrary, Voluntary and Necessary War. This was probably written after The History of the World; Ralegh reflects on what must, after all his researches, have seemed the usual trade and occupation of mankind. Though ill-balanced as a whole, the essay is most powerfully written, and the attitude to war should be contrasted with that implied in the letter on the Cadiz action. It never enters Ralegh's head that war at any time is glorious; the farthest he goes in justifying it at all is to admit that it may be necessary to repel an invader and that it may be legitimate to occupy by force sparsely-inhabited regions—though he points out that there is no clear division between a harmless occupation and the abominable war of invasion which carries in its train the extermination of a native population. On the causes of war, Ralegh speaks often in terms a modern can understand—discontent and unemployment at home will often make a ruler find a pretext for a war, and so will a heavy increase of population and the consequent need for lebensraum. But the chief cause of the chief kind of war (arbitrary war) is, of course, ambition:

To speak in general: whosoever hath dominion absolute over some one, authority less absolute over many more, will seek to draw those that are not wholly his own into entire subjection. It fares with politic bodies as with physical: each would convert all into their own proper substance, and cast forth as excrements what will not be changed.

Ralegh has the Elizabethan horror of civil war—'a greater plague cannot come upon a people'. Although he cannot share the Tudor belief in the divinity of monarchy, believing as he does that laws are man-made and can, theoretically, be changed by the will of man, he does argue that since human nature is imperfect, all human government is imperfect, and that it is far, far better to acquiesce in obedience to the established government than to institute chaos and anarchy by setting out to introduce another form of government by means of civil war. In any case, civil dissension never proceeds from principles or high motives: the perpetual restlessness of mankind is used by the avarice, ambition and vengefulness of the few. Liberty is but a word in the mouth in time of civil war: 'The common people of England have suffered the same fate as other nations: they have been drawn with heat and fury to shed one another's blood for such a liberty as their leaders never intended they should have.' This thought leads Ralegh on to a great passage of pity for all who die in war ignorant of the base and selfish ends they have given their lives to promote:

What deluded wretches, then, have a great part of mankind been, who have either yielded themselves to be slain in causes which, if truly known, their heart would abhor, or been the bloody executioners of other men's ambition! 'Tis a hard fate to be slain for what a man should never willingly fight, yet few soldiers have laid themselves down in the bed of honour under better circumstances.

Whether one agrees with Ralegh's attitude or not, the intellectual power of his work must be recognised; the insoluble puzzle is to know how the author could also be the author of Instructions to his Son and the compiler of Maxims of State.

We shall leave aside the multitude of short tracts which show the insatiable curiosity of Ralegh's mind, discourses on the invention of ships, on war with Spain, orders to be observed by commanders of his fleet, observations touching trade and commerce with the Hollander, and turn now to the great history of the world.

The Composition of The History of the World

Of his temerity in setting out, an ageing prisoner, to write a history of the world that should be no mere sketch or popular account, but a comprehensive record of all ages past, Ralegh was himself fully aware. 'In whom had there been no other defect (who am all defect) than the time of the day, it were enough: the day of a tempestuous life, drawn on to the very evening ere I began.' Had he started the work in his youth and freedom, I might yet well have doubted that the darkness of age and death would have covered over both it and me long before the performance'. An undertaking so preposterously difficult in the circumstances, none but a Ralegh would have had the daring to consider or the self-confidence to embark upon. It is Virginia and Guiana in the world of learning; not the diligence and the energy even of a Ralegh could carry the colossal project to completion. When the task was begun it is impossible to say: the plan must have been maturing in his mind for years, certainly before the 1607 (or 1608) often conjectured as a starting-point. Some hint that the first volume was nearing its conclusion in 1611 is given by an entry in the Stationers' Register of that year, but it was not until 1614 that there appeared a

folio without title-page, giving in 1,000,000 words the story of mankind from the Creation to Rome in the second century B.C. That Ralegh intended, and indeed had 'hewn out', a second and third volume, he tells us himself at the close of the first, adding that many discouragements 'persuaded his silence', including the death of the young Prince Henry, to whom the work had been directed. The work was well received by all save King James, who found his prisoner 'too saucy in censuring princes', and through the century it achieved a real eminence of favour, especially with the republicans: Cromwell recommended it, Milton used it. Ralegh's bibliographer, T. N. Brushfield, gives a list of eleven editions published before the turn of the century. But fashions in history change: there seem to be only three editions between 1687 and the present day; the last edition was 1829. Matthew Arnold made a disparaging comparison of Ralegh's method with that of Thucydides. There are, however, some signs that the work is more charitably received than it was in the last century, though it must be confessed that no one would dream of turning to it as an authority. It is, frankly, not the history that really interests us; but that it is more than an empty monument of English prose, I shall try to demonstrate in the succeeding pages.

There has been some sharpness in the arguments on how much Ralegh was indebted to others in composing the History. It is not to be expected that such a work could have been written by the most learned historian (which Ralegh was not) without consultations with others any more than without using other men's books. Ben Jonson (in his cups) claimed that 'the best wits in England were employed for making of his History' and that he himself 'had written a piece to him of the Punic War which he [Ralegh] altered and set in his book'. What sounds in Jonson's mouth like the immoral employment of other men's brains is presumably only a rather extended use of any scholar's practice of asking for information and clarification among his acquaintances. For Ralegh, the physical difficulty of seeing all the works he wished to consult must have been great, and he must have been forced to rely upon learned friends more than he would have done had he had freedom of movement. Traditionally, among his helpers are named Dr. Robert Burhill (for 'Mosaic and Oriental antiquities'), Harriot and the two other 'magi' of Ralegh's fellow-prisoner Northumberland, and Sir John Hoskyns. Ralegh indicates in the Preface the sort of consultation he practised, when he acknowledges his ignorance of Hebrew and says that occasionally he has 'borrowed the interpretation of some of my learned friends.'

Rather more perturbing evidence of reliance on others has been found in the first chapter, in the account and explanation of the Creation. That much of Ralegh's philosophy as revealed here is conventional and familiar is immaterial: we have learned to expect from Ralegh the rephrasing of traditional and time-honoured thought. But it appears that the extremely learned citations of authorities gathered at the foot of these early pages are sometimes dust in the eyes of the reader. Dr. Arnold Williams has explained [in Studies in Philology, xxxxiv, 1937] how anyone who wished to gather all the opinions expressed by theologians on the first three chapters of Genesis would find them most conveniently collected for him in many commentaries. Such a commentary was that of Benedict Pererius, Commentariorum et Disputionum in Genesin. Ralegh hardly mentions Pererius in his footnotes, but Dr. Williams shows that the impressive review of the schoolmen and church-fathers is not based on original reading but is simply taken out of Pererius's commentary, even to the point of fairly close translation in the text itself. Once, indeed, Ralegh slips in translation. 'Beroaldus affirmeth that bdela in Hebrew signifieth "pearl": so doth Eugubinus; and Jerome calls it "oleaster".' Unfortunately, in Pererius's Latin text, Jerome Oleaster is the name of another authority who supports the interpretation that bdela means 'pearl'. This discovery of Ralegh's reliance on ready-made commentaries does not mean that he has surrendered his own interpretations and his liberty of conjecture. But before we congratulate Ralegh on the wide reading he undertook for his History, we must remember such short cuts as these which he ingeniously and silently took.

The Purpose of History

In composing a history of the world, Ralegh gives very much more than a record of events. To begin with, 'history' is an all-embracing term: almost every known branch of learning is used or discussed in the work—philosophy, theology, comparative religion, ethics, geography, astronomy and astrology, political theory, biblical criticism, and the art of war. This is so, not because, as an historian, Ralegh likes to indulge in asides or in a little trespass outside his province, or even that his work must take cognisance of the fruits of research in other branches of knowledge. There is simply no segmentation of these different learnings; Ralegh's study is Man, and all aspects of that study are as one. An account of Man which concentrated on political history or social history would have seemed false and partial history. Ralegh begins his History at the Creation not merely because he must begin at the beginning, but because he cannot separate history from metaphysics, and the history of man is meaningless unless prefaced with a conception of the nature of man, his relation with God and the purpose of his being on earth at all. Like the ideal epic poem, Ralegh's History was to expound 'all ye know and all ye need to know'; it is indeed an interpretation of man, explained in terms of his history.

Again, the notion of history as a faithful presentation of the events of the past for the reader to find what interpretation and derive what profit he can from them was quite foreign to Renaissance ideas. No historian considered an accumulation of accurate facts as his objective. The 'ending end of all earthly learning', said Sir Philip Sidney, is 'virtuous action'. Knowledge for knowledge sake was meaningless; knowledge was for the betterment of the individual and society, and the scholar had to make clear the present and immediate value of his researches. History was understood to be a study of the past undertaken in order to throw light on the events of the present—and what had no contemporary application was not worth the recording. From a study of history, Puttenham the rhetorician said, a man learns 'what is the best course to be taken in all his actions and advices in this world'. Ralegh is at one with his age in considering history to be justified only in so far as it serves to instruct men how to behave in the sight of their fellow-men and in the sight of God. His great Preface is called by a modern scholar [L. B. Campbell] the 'fullest and most inspired expression' of 'the great tradition' of the Renaissance view of the use of history.

History, Ralegh explains, multiplies almost infinitely the experience available to any one man in his lifetime; history 'hath given us life in our understanding', we behold plainly our long dead ancestors living again and by the example of their fortunes and follies learn what, in our own lives or our own society, is meet to be followed and pursued. 'We may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal, by the comparison and application of other men's fore-passed miseries with our own like errors and ill-deservings.' In the body of the History we find scattered such observations as that the 'end and scope of all history [is] to teach by examples of time past such wisdom as may guide our desires and actions' (II, 21, vi).

The doctrine that history must always convey its lesson to modern times can be seen on the pragmatic level in the realm of social conduct and of state 'policy'. Ralegh always draws the moral of the story. Darius fights the invader Alexander instead of breaking his fury by delaying tactics (IV, 2, iii). 'The invaded', comments Ralegh, 'ought evermore to fight upon the advantage of time and place. Because we read histories to inform our understanding by the examples therein found, we will give some instances of those that have perished by adventuring in their own countries to charge an invading army …' Asides like this are everywhere to be seen. Opening the History quite at random, one finds that the life of the king Amazia gives rise to a very interesting little essay on the uselessness of a regime of severity to cover weakness in the personality of the ruler. A section on the strife of the Carthaginians with their mercenaries is followed by a long section of general reflection on a tyranny and its consequences. Every effect noted in the History is given a cause—'Such was the recompense of his treachery …' Every incident is searched for its bearing on matters of general interest. What Ralegh gathers from the story of Samson is amusing enough (II, 15, i). The first comment is on Samson's mother being forbidden strong drink during her pregnancy: 'it seemeth that many women of this age have not read, or at least will not believe this precept; the most part forbearing not drinks; … filling themselves with all sorts of wines and with artificial drinks far more forcible: by reason whereof, so many wretched feeble bodies are born into the world, and the races of the able and strong men in effect decayed.'

But although this kind of moralising, in things both of little and great importance in worldly action, is rooted in Ralegh's method, and although it gives a constant alertness to all he says, for not an action is noted unless it can be made to bear fruit, yet it is but dallying beside the main purpose of the History. Ralegh's phrase was 'a policy no less wise than eternal' and that which really inspires him is not worldly wisdom but the desire to show how human history, which is a record of God's providence and His judgments on the deeds of humankind, provides constant lessons to all who study it, princes and private men, how to frame their lives in a manner acceptable to God. For Ralegh, God is with mankind from the beginning to the end of Time, punishing and rewarding and bringing to pass in every least action. So that in writing history, we teach by the examples of the rise and fall of great men and great nations 'for what virtue and piety God made prosperous and for what vice and deformity he made wretched'. 'God's judgments upon the greater and the greatest have been left to posterity, first, by those happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided [in the Old Testament], and secondly by their virtue who have gathered the acts and ends of men mighty and remarkable in the world [historians].' Since God's judgments do not vary, what his providence and justice allotted to past ages and different empires he will allot to our own day and age. 'We find that God is everywhere the same God.'

The judgments of God are for ever unchangeable; neither is he wearied by the long process of time and won to give his blessing in one age to that which he hath cursed in another. Wherefore those that are wise, or whose wisdom, if it be not great, yet is true and well grounded, will be able to discern the bitter fruits of irreligious policy, as well among those examples that are found in ages removed far from the present as in those of latter times.

To prove how the examples of past times act as a warning to men of the present to avoid incurring the wrath of God, Ralegh in his Preface runs rapidly—and devastatingly—through the lives of the kings of England pointing out their viciousness and the harvest they reaped.

Such then is the purpose and intention Ralegh had in compiling a history of the world. Not to present only an accurate record of the main events of the past, but to give a picture of man, his nature and development, for the purpose of inculcating in his readers the wisdom they needed so to guide their steps in this world as to achieve God's blessing. This aim Ralegh shares with all his contemporaries who dealt with the past, whether it be Shakespeare in his historical plays or Holinshed in his Chronicles….

Chronology and Miracles

The modern reader will find the contents-list of The History of the World exceedingly odd. The problems of chronology presented by Genesis and the Old Testament have ceased to worry us; the life-spans of the patriarchs, the location of Paradise, the kind of wood used for the Ark, are no longer of vital concern to the serious historian. The space given to the retelling of Hebrew history would seem less disproportionate had Ralegh carried his work on to later volumes, but even so, the attention he gives it shows that the various epochs had a quite different value for Ralegh than for us and that he had a loyalty to the Old Testament as an historical record which a later age has rejected. Fidelity to the Bible is the cause of most of the strangeness of the appearance of the History and also the cause of most of Ralegh's difficulties in arranging his account of human affairs.

In the first place, there is 'that never resolved question and labyrinth of times'. Within the Old Testament there was a host of difficulties in establishing the proper dating of the events described, and then there was the problem of dovetailing into it the pagan records of antiquity. The difficulties of chronology that faced the Renaissance historian and the solutions which Ralegh put forward have been fully analysed by E. R. Strath-mann: the enormous concern Ralegh had about the problems is evident in almost every chapter of the History and in the formidable chronological table in which Ralegh sets out his synchronisation of the various records available to him. Professor Strathmann has high praise for Ralegh's 'studious industry', and if we may tend to regret that so much diligence and time had to be spent in attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable, we can at least admire the seriousness and sobriety of Ralegh's methods. Cardinal with Ralegh is the truth of the Bible: to reconcile the Bible with itself he is prepared to spend all the endeavours of reason. Where in the end it is not possible to square differences and disagreements, as in the question of the length of time between the Flood and the birth of Abraham, it is not the Bible, but man's imperfect understanding that is to be blamed. Ralegh has not reached his confidence in the inviolability of the Scriptures without great struggle; like Sir Thomas Browne, he has fought the battle of Lepanto within himself. But having determined that, in spite of apparent inconsistencies and absurdities, the Bible presents an accurate record of history, he is prepared to go to infinite pains to explain as reasonable what may seem dark to human understanding. Chapter Seven of the first book, an account of the Flood, is one of profound interest as an example of Ralegh's method. He takes in every account of the great floods of antiquity, assesses with scrupulous care the evidence on the various problems associated with the story—his witnesses ranging from Galileo to soothsayers he has spoken with in America. The whole exposition is a remarkable example of Ralegh's 'use of new learning to bolster old belief, to use Professor Strathmann's phrase.

The details of Ralegh's chronological struggles need not concern us: his acceptance, for example, of Egyptian records but his denial that they can be taken at their face value as appearing to prove 'men before Adam'. But there are other difficulties the solving of which provides a good deal that is of interest to the modern reader, like the relation of ancient non-biblical legends and early history to the Old Testament. His attitude to pagan legends in general is that they are dark expressions of truths to be found in the Scriptures:

Now as Cain was the first Jupiter, and from whom also the Ethnicks had the invention of sacrifice: so were Jubal, Tubal and Tubalcain (inventors of pastorage, smithscraft and music) the same which were called by the ancient profane writers Mercurius, Vulcan and Apollo …

Although the muddle is sometimes appalling, when Moses, Prometheus, Hercules, Hermes Trismegistus and Aesculapius are all thrown together and their achievements rationally discussed, one has to admire Ralegh for his earnestness within the framework of his assumptions. And his conviction, in dealing with Greek legends, that 'most fables and poetical fictions were occasioned by some ancient truth, which either by ambiguity of speech or some allusion they did maimedly and darkly express' anticipates modern reconstructions of the historicity of the legendary heroes of Greece and Crete—even though his own rationalising of Minos or Oedipus may not provide food for more than amusement.

As with chronology and pre-history, so with miracles: the testimony of Scripture must not be impeached, but must be supported by every effort of reason. This is not to say that Ralegh tries to explain away miracles by a naturalistic interpretation—quite the reverse. The passage of the Israelites across the Red Sea (II, 3, viii) is discussed with an awe-inspiring fund of information, geographical and scientific, to prove that the rolling back of the waters could have come about in no other way but by the direct hand of God.

But in spite of our admiration for the intellectual energy Ralegh shows, it is undoubtedly a relief to turn from his attempts to use the Old Testament as a basis for the early history of mankind and make it yield a reasonable account (wrestlings which Ralegh's faith demanded and which ours does not) to the less debatable ground of Greek and Roman history. There the settling of problems which by their nature cannot be settled, no longer hinders the unrolling of Ralegh's map of human achievement.

…..

The Style of the 'History'

The greatest writing in the History is in the passages of general reflection we have been quoting from. Even though the quotations are not so full as they should be to give the proper flavour of Ralegh's prose, their length will indicate how Ralegh achieves his effects not by the single pregnant of illuminating phrase, but by the onward surge of a paragraph. His prose is like the sea whose majesty is not in single waves but in the piling up of wave upon wave against the shore. Long and intricate sentences and balanced clauses build up passage after passage of solemnity and dignity. The rhythm is never staccato, but is sometimes kept moving and flowing almost for a whole folio page before it sinks to rest. One example will serve to show the architecture of his prose; in the following passage he is talking of the seven ages of man and has come to describe the last, which is compared to Saturn:

wherein our days are sad and overcast, and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth. Our attendants are sicknesses and variable infirmities, and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired, whom when Time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burthen to ourselves, being of no other use than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when (as aforesaid) we for the most part, and never before, prepare for our eternal habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs, groans and sad thoughts, and in the end by the workmanship of death finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life, towards which we always travel both sleeping and waking: neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day, by the glorious promise of entertainments; but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the house of death, whose doors lie open at all hours and to all persons. For this tide of man's life, after it once turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never floweth again; our leaf once fallen, springeth no more, neither doth the sun or the summer adorn us again with the garments of new leaves and flowers. (I, 2, v).

Though the imagery is often formal and conventional and too little varied, metaphorical writing often brings great power. When he talks of the blindness of the Greeks to their danger from Philip, he writes: "Indeed it was not in their philosophy to consider that all great alterations are stormlike, sudden and violent, and that then it is overlate to repair the decayed and broken banks when great rivers are once swollen, fast-running and enraged."

It must be said that Ralegh's narrative style, though never dull, is not the most brilliant. Not that there is not vividness: the story of Alexander moves in alert fashion, enlivened by sudden sallies of the historic present. Indeed, the chapter on Alexander is probably the very best in the work; for narrative, description, reflection and interpretation, it is a typical example of Ralegh's methods and an outstanding example of his style. He seems to have absorbed and assimilated his material and to be writing from himself. Elsewhere, Ralegh seems unable to make the actions of the past live with the vividness he had given in his younger years to the accounts of actions in which he had himself taken part. But it is a saving grace of the History that both matter and manner are made fresh and insistent by the constant introduction of contemporary events. These intercalations show how alive Ralegh's own imagination was and how much history was for him what he claimed it to be—a comment from the past on the sort of actions and experiences undergone by modern man. There can be nothing dead in history to a man for whom every least incident stirs his memory and brings out a parallel incident from his own experience. And the reader's imagination also is kept alert by being constantly reminded of the unfailing relevance of history. Ralegh never fails to write interestingly when he dips into the rich store-house of his experience, and the style of the History is kept abundantly alive by his asides. He relates the smoking out of the enemy from the caves of Languedoc during the French civil wars, his landing at Fayal, the assault on Cadiz. Sometimes it is just an anecdote: Alexander's intolerance of an insult recalls Sir John Perrot's famous scoff at Elizabeth, which more than anything else caused his ruin; the furnishing of the dark corridors of history by conjecture he compares to the inventiveness of map-makers, and relates the story of Don Pedro de Sarmiento, Ralegh's prisoner, who put an island in a map to please his wife. Towards the end of the work, when Ralegh has presumably realized that he will never extend his history to modern times, there is a far greater introduction of parallels and illustrations, not only from Ralegh's experience, but from the whole of modern history. It is very important to remember that the dipping into his own memory and the drawing of parallels ancient and modern are not tokens of a meandering, conversational attitude to history, but evidence of the way in which Ralegh's whole mind was engaged on what he was writing. Nothing was

foreign, nothing separate and useless. Like the poet that he was, his whole experience, in seemingly distinct spheres, stood alert and at call to furnish an illustration or provide a comment.

Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor. One would think, as Ralegh drives home the shining moral of his History, that all the lusting after the rewards of men and the battling for might and empire are but the building of Babel, impious strivings that cannot buy lasting satisfaction in this life and forbid all hope of salvation—one would think that he had achieved in himself that patience and wisdom and understanding, that clear-eyed rejection of the world with its storms and strains and false values, which came to King Lear as he went prisonwards:

so we'll live
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies and hear (poor rogues)
Talk of court-news, and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out,
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies. And we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

Upon such sacrifices the gods indeed throw incense. But Ralegh was still to give the most frightening confirmation of his own vision of unteachable man, who will not, because he cannot, renounce his affection for what the world has to offer. Two years after the publication of the History of the World Ralegh wins his freedom to prosecute his mad endeavour in Guiana, to win back those things his words had constantly and insistently declared to be a nothingness: honour, position and wealth. He denied his own better knowledge in coveting those things, and the utter and wretched failure of his mission is really the final word and seal upon his historian's survey of the futility of ambition.

When is it that we examine this great account? Never while we have one vanity left us to spend; we plead for titles till our breath fail us, dig for riches whiles our strength enableth us, exercise malice while we can revenge, and then, when Time hath beaten from us both youth, pleasure and health, and that nature itself hateth the house of old age, we remember with Job that we must go the way from whence we shall not return, and that our bed is made ready for us in the dark …

But what examples have ever moved us? What persuasions reformed us? Or what threatenings made us afraid? We behold other men's tragedies played before us; we hear what is promised and threatened; but the world's bright glory hath put out the eyes of our minds, and these betraying lights (with which we only see) do neither look up towards termless joys nor down towards endless sorrows, till we neither know nor can look for anything else at the world's hands.