Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time

_North British Review_, No. XLV. -1. ‘Life of Sir Walter Raleigh. ' By P. Fraser Tytler, F. R. S. London, 1853. -2. ‘Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana. ' Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk (Hakluyt Society), 1848. -3. ‘Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh. ' By M. Napier. Cambridge, 1853. -4. ‘Raleigh's Works, with Lives by Oldys and Birch. ' Oxford, 1829-5. ‘Bishop Goodman's History of his own Times. ' London, 1839.

‘TRUTH is stranger than fiction. ' A trite remark. We all say it again and again: but how few of us believe it! How few of us, when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it stands! On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it all not to have been so very wonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace motives; to lower every story down to the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God who is near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise away all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident.