SOURCE: "The Judicious Historian," in Sir Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism, Columbia University Press, 1951, pp. 254-75.

Informations are often false, records not always true, and notorious actions commonly insufficient to discover the passions which did set them first on foot. (History, II, xxi, 6)

The chronicle of Ralegh's fame and disrepute, in Chapter II, stops with his imprisonment for treason in 1603, although a number of later allusions have been cited for their bearing upon specific problems in the interpretation of his writings. Some further samplings of opinion about him, especially in the century after his death, will be helpful both in concluding this survey of his thought and influence and in evaluating recent theories about his association with a "School of Night." After 1603 popular feeling against him subsided, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his unpopularity waned into neglect; and after his death admiration for his achievements outran memories of partisan strife.

I

The change in Ralegh's reputation is epitomized in the contrast between the harsh accusations of the judge who sentenced him in 1603 and the temperate words of his judge in 1618: "Your faith hath heretofore been questioned, but I am satisfied you are a good Christian, for your book, which is an admirable work, doth testify as much."¹ The "damnable fiend of hell, / Mischievous Machiavel" of the early libels is permitted to say, balladwise:

The unfair trial in 1603; the loss of oppressive powers which, in their exercise, had made Ralegh hated; his History; his speech upon the scaffold; the course of events which raised him, the anti-Spanish victim of a Stuart king, to a kind of martyrdom: all tended to soften gossip into legend, bitter conflicts into conflicting evidence. Not that imprisonment and execution killed all enmities: to the day of his death he suffered an opposition ranging from the indifference of a changed Court to active hostility; after his death, his integrity was challenged in the pamphlets of Stukeley and Bacon;³ and in the next generation his son, Carew, sought to retrieve his losses in name and property.

The importance of the History in offsetting the old charges of atheism derives from the high esteem in which that work was held in the seventeenth century, when it went through twice as many editions as the collected works of either Spenser or Shakespeare. Naturally enough, Ralegh's exploits at Court and in the field figure prominently in histories and memoirs, sometimes with unfriendly comment; but his fame in the century following his death encompasses all his varied interests and activities without disproportionate emphasis upon his political career. He was credited with a statesman's wisdom; his miscellaneous writings were sought after and frequently published; his name was often invoked in opposition to Spain; even his experiments, and most notably his "cordial," were held in respect for a generation or two. But dominating all, and in a sense including all, was The History of the World, with its religious orthodoxy, its moral philosophy, and its frequent digression into commentary on affairs of state. In a book on history which served as a text at Cambridge until the beginning of the eighteenth century, the scholar Diggory Whear⁴ praised Ralegh for his "universal history"; the soldier Oliver Cromwell⁵ commended the History to his son; the churchman Edward Stillingfleet⁶ quoted it on the Flood; the antiquary Sir William Dugdale⁷ could not "better express or account for" the origin of government "than in the words of Sir Walter Ralegh"; and the philosopher John Locke⁸ recommended the work for "general history."

These representative judgments in the seventeenth century are not without parallels in the eighteenth, perhaps with greater emphasis on the style of the History. One of the most extravagant encomiums is from the pen of Henry Felton:

Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World is a work of so vast a compass, such endless variety, that no genius but one adventurous as his own durst have undertaken that great design. I do not apprehend any great difficulty in collecting and commonplacing an universal history from the whole body of historians; that is nothing but mechanic labor. But to digest the several authors in his mind, to take in all their majesty, strength, and beauty, to raise the spirit of meaner historians, and to equal all the excellencies of the best, is Sir Walter's peculiar praise. His style is the most perfect, the happiest, and most beautiful of the age he wrote in; majestic, clear, and manly; and he appears everywhere so superior, rather than unequal, to his subject that the spirit of Rome and Athens seems to be breathed into his work…. If he had attempted the history of his own country, or his own times, he would have excelled even Livy and Thucydides; and the annals of Queen Elizabeth by his pen, without diminishing from the serious, judicious Camden, had been the brightest glory of her reign, and would have transmitted his history as the standard of our language even to the present age.⁹

Of the writers before 1650, only King Charles I, in Felton's judgment, is comparable in his style to Sidney, Bilson, Hooker, or Ralegh. Tempering this fulsome praise, Samuel Johnson considers Ralegh's History "deservedly celebrated for the labor of his researches and the elegance of his style," but concludes that "he has produced an historical dissertation, but seldom risen to the majesty of history."¹⁰ The opinions of Felton and Johnson must stand here for many. In the course of the eighteenth century, Ralegh's History lost the immediacy in content and method that it had for the preceding age, and some pertinent comments reflecting the change have already been cited.¹¹

Not even the History, thus commended and read, cut off entirely the memory of his reputation as a freethinker. When the provincial inquiry at Cerne Abbas had been long forgotten in the scandals of the court of James I, when even Father Parsons' widely published Responsio had been buried under an avalanche of new controversial pamphlets, the tradition of Ralegh's "atheism" remained alive. References to it in the seventeenth century illustrate further the three principal definitions of "atheism" by which I have examined Ralegh's works in Chapters IV to VI. Thus Ralegh's alleged denial of God becomes an instrument to puff a translation of a book written by Leonard Lessius "against atheists and politicians of these days."¹² The translator, A. B., entitles his work Ralegh His Ghost, and in prefatory remarks by "The Apparition to His Friend" allows the ghost of Ralegh to reject "a foul and most unjust aspersion upon me for my presumed denial of a Deity," to appeal to his "friend's" recollection of his praise of Lessius, and to call for a translation of this "proof of the being of a Deity." With an unghostly concern for the book trade, the prefatory spirit further charges, "Let the title bear my name, that so the readers may acknowledge it as done by my solicitation." The translator, in his preface to the reader, blandly acknowledges his fiction as a device to attract readers:

I have feigned the occasion hereof to be an apparition of Sir Walter Ralegh's ghost to a living friend of his, entreating him to translate the same. My reason of using this fiction is because it is well known that Sir Walter was a man of great natural parts, and yet was suspected of the most foul and execrable crime of atheism. How truly, God and himself only know; though I must think the best of him, and the rather in regard of that most excellent and learned description of God which himself setteth down in the first lines of his history or chronicle.

Now, in regard of his eminency in the world when he was alive, I am the more easily persuaded that the very name of him (by way of this feigned apparition, and the like answerable title of the translation) may beget in many an earnest desire of perusing this book….

The device, says A. B., wrongs no one, not Sir Walter "since I do vindicate and free him from the former blot as presuming him to be innocent of the suspected crime." The Preface, of course, has no independent value, either as a "vindication" of Ralegh or as a confirmation of the old charges. The clumsy trick is worth citing only as an indication of the drawing power of Ralegh's name, of the lingering record of his "atheism," and of the influence of the History in countering that tradition.

An association between "atheism" and misconduct is made by an early biographer, John Shirley. Aware of the charges against Ralegh but ignorant of any formal record of them, Shirley seeks an explanation in his hero's misdeeds.

[Ralegh] was seized with the idle court-disease of love, the unfortunate occasion of the worst action of his whole life. For in the year 1595, I find him under a cloud, banished the court, and his mistress' favor withdrawn, for devirginating a maid of honor. But why for this one action he should lie under the imputation of an atheist, and from a single crime get the denomination of a debauch, is the logic of none but the vulgar.¹³

By this logic, writes Shirley, other favorites—Leicester, Cecil, and Essex—merit the same titles; "neither ever was it accounted any great crime in the orb of courts." A direct connection between Ralegh's alleged offense and his reputation as an atheist is pure guesswork on Shirley's part. What is interesting about his explanation is that he is living in a religious and moral climate enough like that of the Elizabethans to accept wrongdoing as a possible definition of "atheism."

A third allusion to Ralegh's atheism links it with his independence in philosophy. This one, from the pen of Francis Osborne, is also muddled in its facts but clear in intent.

Sir Walter Ralegh was the first (as I have heard) that ventured to tack about, and sail aloof from the beaten tract of the Schools: who upon the discovery of so apparent an error as a torrid zone intended to proceed in an inquisition after more solid truths, till the mediation of some whose livelihood lay in hammering shrines for this superannuated study possessed Queen Elizabeth that such doctrine was against God no less than her father's honor, whose faith (if he owed any) was grounded upon school-divinity. Whereupon she chid him, who was (by his own confession) ever after branded with the title of an atheist, though a known asserter of God and providence.¹⁴

Bacon and Selden, Osborne continues, suffered a like imputation. With all its distortions and ambiguities, Osborne's statement contains one significant idea: that Ralegh's "atheism" was somehow associated with his hostility to scholasticism, a hostility which we have seen in action in the debate with Ironside.

There is little profit in following through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the commentary upon Ralegh as a "free-thinker." Two of these later comments, however, are noteworthy as showing how the passage of time had obscured certain Elizabethan concepts. The first, by the philosopher Dugald Stewart writing "Of the Fundamental Laws of Human Belief," concerns the skeptical passage from Ralegh's Preface which I have discussed at length in Chapter VII. The significant point about Stewart's remark is a slip in quotation which transforms Ralegh into a thoroughgoing rationalist.

It has been observed to me very lately by a learned and ingenious friend, that in one of the phrases which I have proposed to substitute for the common sense of Buffier and Reid, I have been anticipated, two hundred years ago, by Sir Walter Ralegh. "Where natural reason hath built anything so strong against itself, as the same reason can hardly assail it, much less batter it down; the same, in every question of nature and infinite [sic] power, may be approved for a fundamental law of human knowledge." (Preface to Ralegh's History of the World.) The coincidence, in point of expression, is not a little curious, but is much less wonderful than the coincidence of the thought with the soundest logical conclusions of the eighteenth century. The very eloquent and philosophical passage which immediately follows the above sentence is not less worthy of attention.¹⁵

Had Ralegh actually written "in every question of nature and infinite power" he would have contradicted himself on almost every page of his History. For Stewart, of course, this is merely an aside of small consequence to his own work, and he may have taken his quotation at second hand; but the unconscious reversal of Ralegh's meaning highlights the difference in philosophy between the sixteenth century and the Age of Reason. Elsewhere, Stewart approves the linking of the names of Bacon and Ralegh, in terms that are flattering but free from gross error.

Both of them owed to the force of their own minds their emancipation from the fetters of the school; both were eminently distinguished above their contemporaries by the originality and enlargement of their philosophical views; and both divide, with the venerable Hooker, the glory of exemplifying to their yet unpolished countrymen the richness, variety, and grace which might be lent to the English idiom by the hand of a master.¹⁶

The second comment, by Matthew Arnold, also bears upon the quality of Ralegh's thought, with no advantage to the Elizabethan. Where Henry Felton had detected the "spirit of Rome and Athens" in the History and considered Ralegh, had he but written of his own times, capable of excelling even Livy and Thucydides, Arnold uses the History to demonstrate why Thucydides is more "modern" than Ralegh. He compares the two on "the manifestation of a critical spirit, the endeavor after a rational arrangement and appreciation of the facts." Thucydides chooses his subject for its meaningfulness and undertakes to present it in perspective. Here Arnold quotes a few lines from the opening of Ralegh's discussion of the terrestrial paradise, as an example of woolgathering in content and method.

Which is the ancient here, and which is the modern? Which uses the language of an intelligent man of our own days? which a language wholly obsolete and unfamiliar to us? Which has rational appreciation and control of his facts? which wanders among them helplessly and without a clue? Is it our countryman, or is it the Greek? And the language of Ralegh affords a fair sample of the critical power, of the point of view, possessed by the majority of intelligent men of his day; as the language of Thucydides affords us a fair sample of the critical power of the majority of intelligent men in the age of Pericles.¹⁷

The passage which Arnold quotes from the History serves his purpose well. That it does not represent fully either Ralegh or his book, or that Arnold could have found passages comparable to what he admires in Thucydides, is beside the point. Even allowing for Arnold's strict doctrine on what is "classic," we have here a clear indication that the part of the History which was once much admired has become obsolete, something to be dismissed by others than David Hume as "rabbinical learning."

This selection of widely dispersed comments on Ralegh and the quality and independence of his thinking emphasizes the need, if we would understand him, of reading his works in their Elizabethan setting. The judgments of his seventeenth-century readers, even when marked by errors in fact or bias in politics, show at least an understanding of his "language." Later changes in philosophy, religion, and language carry with them inevitable changes in emphasis and construction; in time the reputation for freethought and independence that was once a liability to Ralegh becomes his praise—but with equal dangers of distortion. In most of the biographies down to the late nineteenth century, references to Ralegh's "atheism" are brushed aside, sometimes lightly (as belied by the evidence) and sometimes indignantly. In the studies of the past half century there has been a tendency to accept the Elizabethan charges against him as evidence, at the least, of broad views in religion. The discovery and publication of the testimony at Cerne Abbas accelerated this trend and led to the elaboration of theories about a "School of Night," to which we must now turn.

II

Arguments for the existence in the sixteenth century of a "School of Night," a coterie interested in esoteric studies, begin with the topical possibilities of Shakespeare's play, Love's Labour's Lost. A prime target for banter in that play is the ease with which nobles sworn to intellectual pursuits are distracted by an embassy of fair ladies. To Berowne's description of his lady, "No face is fair that is not full so black," the King replies:

O paradox, Blacke is the badge of Hell,
The hue of dungions, and the Schoole of night:
And beauties crest becomes the heauens well.¹⁸

About the time of the first performance of Love's Labour's Lost appeared George Chapman's The Shadow of Night (1594), two abstract and obscure poems exalting the studious, careful approach to learning:

No pen can anything eternal write
That is not steeped in humour of the Night.¹⁹

In a dedication to Matthew Royden, Chapman laments the neglect of learning, with one note of optimism:

But I stay this spleen when I remember, my good Matthew, how joyfully oftentimes you reported unto me that most ingenious Derby, deepsearching Northumberland, and skill-embracing heir of Hunsdon had most profitably entertained learning in themselves, to the vital warmth of freezing science and to the admirable luster of their true nobility….

Comparing these lines and their contexts, Mr. Arthur Acheson,²⁰ early in the present century, developed the thesis that Love's Labour's Lost and The Shadow of Night are antagonistic. Later elaborations of this theory, notably by the editors of the "New Cambridge Shakespeare," make Matthew Royden, the three noblemen praised by Chapman, and Chapman himself the nucleus of the "School of Night," devoted to the serious study of the arts and sciences.²¹ The next step is to unite with them the "School of Atheism," charged to Ralegh's leadership by the Jesuit Parsons. Northumberland, mentioned by Chapman, was Ralegh's friend, and, as we have already seen, Harriot and Marlowe have been brought, the latter by inference, into Ralegh's group.²² The study of astronomy, the philosophical doubt, the air of aloofness and superiority attributed to these men have led to the identification of Ralegh's "School of Atheism" with the "School of Night" to which Shakespeare presumably refers. Other tenets ascribed to the group are a devotion to art for art's sake, a conviction of the need for deep study to accomplish anything worth while, and an affectation of the vague symbolism of Night and the presiding deity Cynthia. The Elizabethan charge of atheism against them has been variously construed—rarely in its strict modern meaning, more commonly as implying unorthodox opinions and religious liberalism.

Opposed to the "School of Night," according to the theory, is another coterie, in which the chief figures are Shakespeare, his patron Southampton, and his patron's friend, Essex. These gentlemen profess to scorn the laborious nocturnal way of study, and their philosophy is summed up in Berowne's excuses for the sudden renunciation of academic retirement by the King and his three courtiers:

Never durst poet touch a pen to write,
Until his ink were temp'red with Love's sighs; …
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world…. ²³

Earlier Berowne had objected to the studious retirement in these words:

Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.²⁴

In the opposition of the two groups, say those who argue for the existence of the "School of Night," lies part of the meaning of Love's Labour's Lost.

This theorizing has done much to color Ralegh studies, simply by postulating for him an intellectual and temperamental outlook that derives more from his assumed associations than from anything he said or wrote. Some writers have accepted these postulates as established and have based their interpretations upon them. Miss M. C. Bradbrook²⁵ has used the theory as a convenient point of reference for the discussion of Ralegh, Marlowe, Chapman, and, finally, Shakespeare's satirical allusions. Miss Frances A. Yates,²⁶ however, broadens the field to find in Love's Labour's Lost references to a number of literary rivalries (for example, John Florio and John Eliot, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare and Chapman), allusions to the marital difficulties of Ralegh's friend, Northumberland, and even a defense of Sidney's "Stella." …

… I find little agreement between the doctrines credited to the "School of Night" and the opinions of Ralegh that can be derived from his own speeches or writings. The doctrines of the "School," as variously described by proponents of the theory, imply more radical departures from orthodox religious thought than I have been able to find in Ralegh. He had a driving curiosity, abetted by an impulsiveness of temperament, which led him to seek knowledge where he could find it; but these very qualities make him a poor candidate for a coterie. In his studies he commonly sought practical ends: improved navigation; better ships; a more effective cure-all in physic; success in politics; a stronger empire—and personal power. When he is meditative and speculative, as he often is and in the grand manner, he keeps within the limits of a serious, even somber, ethic and an orthodox religion.

The fundamental difficulty of the "School of Night" theory, of course, goes back to Shakespeare's text. Those who propound the theory find an allusion in Love's Labour's Lost and develop to the utmost the topical possibilities of that play, with the result that, as in most studies of Elizabethan topical allusions, identifications abound and conflict. I find no personal allusion in the King's scoffing rejection of Berowne's praise of his "black" lady, and I believe that other evidence for a "School" has been applied too selectively to be convincing. The great value of studies of the "School of Night" has been the light they have thrown upon some literary relationships and theories in the flourishing last decade of the sixteenth century. That value remains even when we abandon attempts to organize these impermanent and often casual associations into formally opposed coteries, and to discover in Shakespeare's play topical allusions of a subtlety one would be surprised to meet in Elizabethan literature.

III

Clearly, three and a half centuries have witnessed wide fluctuations in opinion about Ralegh. He has appeared posthumously in even more roles than he attempted in his tempestuous lifetime, and his reputation has changed as near-contemporaries who shared his intellectual background yielded to writers who judged him by different standards. With such diverse and even flatly contradictory estimates before us, simple caution enjoins a recollection of the premises and major themes of this study before we attempt to draw from it any general conclusions. The most severe limitation upon the available evidence is that we know so little about Ralegh's youth, and the little we know about his early years concerns almost entirely his active, not his contemplative, life. Keeping in mind the problems of evidence set forth in Chapter I, we must be content to base our conclusions on our knowledge of Ralegh in his thirties and of his life thereafter.

In brief, Ralegh's reputation as an "atheist" is traceable in large part to the Catholic polemics against him, especially Parsons' widely circulated attack, and to the casual usage of "atheist" in moral censure. Whatever the cause of the reputation, Ralegh's arrogance and unpopularity did nothing to abate it, although his trial and imprisonment paradoxically won him a reprieve in the court of public opinion. Yet sober accounts of his table talk, by such competent reporters as the Reverend Ralph Ironside and Sir John Harington, in no wise support the charge of "atheism" against him; and his conversations on religious topics, as reported, are consistent with the orthodoxy of his published writings. Only by reading his remarks or his writings out of their Elizabethan setting, or by underestimating the place of natural theology in Elizabethan religious thought, is it possible to discern in Ralegh, so far as we know him, any signs of radical departure from the dominant religious beliefs of his time and country. By finding in his works sober answers to Elizabethan questions designed to ferret out dangerous opinions, and by matching with his statements passages from works of known orthodoxy, I have attempted to restore Raleigh's opinions on religion to their sixteenth-century context. In ethics, as we have seen, it is another story: in action, and to some extent in thought, Ralegh perhaps earned the epithet "Machiavellian," one of the many Elizabethan synonyms for "Atheist." Although his excursions in natural philosophy may have deepened popular distrust of his orthodoxy, where science conflicted with religion Ralegh chose religion, notably in his painstaking attempts to harmonize chronology and Scripture.

The key to Ralegh's skepticism and to its utility is his exception from dogmatic principles of "every question of nature and finite power." If skepticism about the powers of human reason is invoked at all in religious discussion, it is in defense of faith. Ralegh's attack on Aristotelian principles could be construed as heretical only if those principles were wrongly identified (as they were in some minds) with the essentials of Christian belief—what Ralegh sometimes called our "saving faith." As I have suggested, some such misunderstanding may have arisen from the debate with Ironside. But in the realm of second causes Ralegh is indeed a "free" thinker. Once we rid ourselves of the notion that his philosophical skepticism applies to religion, or that his theology is in advance of his time, we can see Ralegh more clearly as an influential worker in a transitional period.

Ralegh's boldest statement of the skeptical position, his attack on the "principles" in the Preface to the History, is of ancient lineage. It is possible to trace his ideas, both directly and indirectly, to the skeptics of Greece and Rome, and to distinguish in them a partiality for the Academics, who were willing to reason from probabilities, rather than for the uncompromising position of the Pyrrhonists. Thoroughgoing Pyrrhonism is found only in his fragmentary translation from Sextus Empiricus and in some sentences of the Preface, there worked into the framework of a philosophy intended to produce results by investigation of second causes. The distinction is significant in its effects: as one historian of philosophy has pointed out, Pyrrhonism strictly and consistently followed was sterile, though it could be the prelude to "freedom of conscience and rational criticism and the absolute right of scientific thought."

The Skeptics, however, reaped none of the benefits of their own system. They remained, as it were, always on the threshold of possible progress. With the keys to great discoveries in their hands, the doors of philosophical and scientific advancement were for ever closed to them by limitations of their own system. The inherent weakness of Pyrrhonism lay in its psychological inconsistency and its negative character. I think that we may safely say that Pyrrhonism was the most consistent system of Skepticism ever offered to the world, and yet it proves most decidedly that complete Skepticism is psychologically impossible.³⁶

From such frustration Ralegh was happily free, both by temperament and by philosophy. It would be an exaggeration to trace his respect for reason and his acceptance of probability directly to the formal philosophy of the Academy; the connection is interesting largely because it places his thought in historical perspective. In practice Ralegh belongs with those men, conspicuous in times of transition, for whom skepticism is a highway, not a dwelling place. Skepticism serves chiefly for the criticism of dogma, and if the criticism is effective the discredited ideas are superseded by new beliefs.³⁷ In this practical function the popular forms of skepticism are akin to the more strictly defined modes of philosophical criticism.

Hence the importance of such amateurs as Ralegh in the history of ideas. Sir Francis Bacon wrote to his uncle Lord Burghley, in the famous letter of 1592 which takes all knowledge as his province for reform, that he sought a "place of any reasonable countenance" because it "doth bring commandment of more wits than a man's own." By his own high place in the last decades of the sixteenth century, Ralegh secured just this command of other "wits" and exercised the command by patronage of men of science—or worked as a partner through his own studies in natural philosophy and navigation. The universal appeal of his History extended his "command" posthumously and won for Ralegh a respectful hearing in the seventeenth century.

As I indicated at the beginning of my study, it would be misleading to generalize about an age from the intensive study of one man, however representative he may have been. Professor Lynn Thorndike's observations concerning the careers of Lucilio Vanini and Francesco Sanchez rightly emphasize the subtle gradations of belief and disbelief which may be found in individuals.

These two cases lend support to the point which we have made more than once: that there is no regular correlation or variation in inverse ratio between theology and science, skepticism and the occult, or science and superstition. In one's man's mind they made one combination: in another, another.³⁸

Keeping in mind this salutary caution, we may yet find in the varied passages from other writers cited by way of parallel to Ralegh's remarks some indication of the extent to which his thought is in harmony with that of his contemporaries. He is throughout more a spokesman than an innovator. His moral philosophy and his religion are deeply rooted in the past, and he shows no inclination to uproot the ancient growth, although he is willing to prune some superfluous branches of Biblical exegesis. He shares some of the superstitions and credulities of his age. But in the new world opening before him, literally in the lands across the sea and figuratively in the science of his day, he seeks, with his fellows, the opportunity for free exploration, unhampered by the "fables of principles." Certain beliefs remain inviolate: the truth of Scripture, the primacy of wisdom over knowledge, of goodness over intellect. Ralegh is neither the Elizabethan "atheist" (save perhaps in the broad implications of ethical criticism) nor the freethinker of twentieth-century fame, but a leader in that energetic company who did not find religious faith a barrier to philosophical and scientific speculations. There are many echelons in the progress of human thought: Ralegh's company was not the vanguard, though some seventeenth-century writers assigned him that post; yet it constituted a body of support without which a vanguard is lost in premature action.

Notes

¹ David Jardine, Criminal Trials, 2 vols. (London, 1832-35), I, 501.

² "Sir Walter Ralegh His Lamentation," from a Huntington Library photostat of the unique original copy in the Pepysian Collection, Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1918 the ballad was twice reprinted (once with an accompanying reproduction) in connection with the Ralegh Tercentenary Commemoration.

³ Quoted above, chap. iv.

⁴De ratione et methodo legendi historias dissertatio (Oxford, 1625); 1st ed., 1623. In the 1625 edition the praise of Ralegh's History is in a marginal note (sig. F3^r). In the expanded 1637 edition, the comment is incorporated in the text (p. 45) and includes praise of Ralegh as well as of his book.

⁵ Charles H. Firth, "Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World," Proceedings of the British Academy, VIII (1918), 15.

⁶ See above, chap. vi.

⁷Origines juridiciales, 3d ed. (1680); quoted by William Oldys, The British Librarian (1738), p. 169.

⁸ "Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman," Works, 9 vols. (London, 1824), II, 409.

⁹A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style, 2d ed. (London, 1715), pp. 245-48.

¹⁰The Rambler, No. 122, Saturday, May 18, 1751; in Works, 16 vols. (New York, 1903), III, 66. Johnson's subject is the difficulty of writing narrative prose and the deficiencies of the British as historians.

¹¹ See above, chap. vi, "Of the Deluge."

¹²Ralegh His Ghost. Or a Feigned Apparition of Sir Walter Ralegh to a Friend of His, for the Translating into English the Book of Leonard Lessius (That Most Learned Man) Entitled "De Providentia Numinis et Animi Immortalitate" … Translated by A. B. ([St. Omer], 1631).

¹³Life, 8 vo. ed. (London, 1677), pp. 36-37. See above, chap. i, note 1.

¹⁴A Miscellany of Sundry Essays, Paradoxes, and Problematical Discourses (London, 1659), Preface, sig. (a) 2. Quoted in part by J. Beau, "La Religion de Sir Walter Ralegh," Revue Anglo-Americaine, XI (1934), 410-22. Ralegh appears as a skeptic in an anecdote (too late in origin to have any value) which illustrates the untrustworthiness of eyewitness accounts. See T. N. Brushfield, Bibliography of Sir Walter Ralegh (Exeter, England, 1908), No. 171 and the references there cited.

¹⁵Collected Works, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1854-60), III, 376. Stewart's references to Ralegh have been quoted in part by Macvey Napier, "The Life and Writings of Sir Walter Raleigh," Edinburgh Review, CXLIII (1840), 67, 96.

¹⁶ "Dissertation Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Part I," Works, ed. Hamilton, I, 78.

¹⁷ "On the Modern Element in Literature," The New Eclectic Magazine, V (July, 1869), 54-55. Arnold's comment on Ralegh has been quoted in part by Charles H. Firth, op. cit.

¹⁸ Quoted with the spelling and punctuation of the 1598 Quarto, sig. F2^r; IV, iii, 254-56, in the conventional numbering of the lines.

¹⁹ "Hymnus in Noctem," lines 376-77.

²⁰Shakespeare and the Rival Poet (New York, 1902).

²¹Love's Labour's Lost, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1923), pp. xviii-xxxiv, 97-130, and notes on IV, iii, 250-52. Cf. Willobie His Avisa, ed. G. B. Harrison (London, 1926), pp. 181-231; and G. B. Harrison, An Elizabethan Journal, 1591-1594 (New York, 1929), Appendix I (b), "Topical Allusions."

²² See above, chap. ii.

²³ IV, iii, 346-53. In this quotation and the next I follow the text of The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).

²⁴ I, i, 86-87.

²⁵The School of Night (Cambridge, England, 1936).

²⁶A Study of "Love's Labour's Lost" (Cambridge, England, 1936)….

³⁶ Mary Mills Patrick, Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism (Cambridge, England, 1899), pp. 96-97.

³⁷Ibid.

³⁸A History of Magic and Experimental Science, VI (New York, 1941), 572.