Essays, Henry David Thoreau [ebook reader with android os txt] 📗

A. Etzler. Part First. Second English Edition, pp. 55. London, 1842. ↩

Herald of Freedom; published weekly by the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society: Concord, NH, Vol. X No. 4. ↩

These extracts have been inserted since the Lecture was read. —⁠H. D. T. ↩

Another and kindred spirit contemporary with Raleigh, who survives yet more exclusively in his reputation, rather than in his works, and has been the subject perhaps of even more and more indiscriminate praise, is Sir Philip Sidney; a man who was no less a presence to his contemporaries, though we now look in vain in his works for satisfactory traces of his greatness. Who, dying at the age of thirty-two, having left no great work behind him, or the fame of a single illustrious exploit, has yet left the rumor of a character for heroic impulses and gentle behavior which bids fair to survive the longer lives and more illustrious deeds of many a worthy else, the splendor of whose reputation seems to have blinded his critics to the faults of his writings. So that we find his Arcadia spoken of with vague and dubious praise as “a book most famous for rich conceits and splendor of courtly expressions.” With regard to whom also this reason is assigned why no monument should be erected to him, that “he is his own monument whose memory is eternized in his writings, and who was born into the world to show unto our age a sample of ancient virtue,” and of whom another says, “It was he whom Queen Elizabeth called her Philip; the Prince of Orange, his master; and whose friendship my Lord Brook was so proud of, that he would have no other epitaph on his grave than this:

‘Here lieth Sir Philip Sidney’s Friend.’ ”

From Raleigh by Edmund Gosse

↩

Arabella Stuart (born about 1575) was James I’s first cousin, the daughter of Charles Stuart, fifth Earl of Lennox, Lord Darnley’s elder brother. About 1588 she had come up to London to be presented to Elizabeth, and on that occasion had amused Raleigh with her gay accomplishments. The legal quibble on which her claim was founded was the fact that she was born in England, whereas James as a Scotchman was supposed to be excluded. Arabella was no pretender; her descent from Margaret, the sister of Henry VIII, was complete, and if James had died childless, and she had survived him, it is difficult to see how her claim could have been avoided in favor of the Suffolk line. ↩

Dr. Robert Tounson, then Dean of Westminster, who became Bishop of Salisbury. —⁠Gosse ↩

There is a pleasant legend that Raleigh and one of his half-brothers were riding up to town from Plymouth, when Raleigh’s horse stumbled and threw him within the precincts of a beautiful Dorsetshire estate, then in possession of the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury, and that Raleigh, choosing to consider that he had thus taken seisin of the soil, asked the Queen for Sherborne26 Castle when he arrived at Court. It may have been on this occasion that Elizabeth asked him when he would cease to be a beggar, and received the reply, “When your Majesty ceases to be a benefactor.” —⁠Gosse ↩

This passage about Alexander and Epaminondas is preceded in Ralegh, as copied by Thoreau in the scrapbook, by some general remarks on that remarkable quality in a few men which Ralegh seems to have felt in himself, which, as he wrote, “Guided handfuls of men against multitudes of equal bodily strength, contrived victories beyond all hope and discourse of reason, converted the fearful passions of his own followers into magnanimity, and the valor of his enemies into cowardice. Such spirits have been stirred up in sundry ages of the world, and in diverse parts thereof, to erect and cast down again, to establish and to destroy, and to bring all things, persons and states to the same certain ends which the infinite Spirit of the Universal, piercing, moving and governing all things, hath ordained.” It was passages like this, in his speech and writings, that laid Ralegh open to the charge of atheism, which seems to have been first brought against him at the same time that his friend the poet Marlowe was similarly accused, in 1592⁠–⁠3, and may have been one of the reasons why Queen Elizabeth withdrew her favor from Ralegh about that time. The definite accusations against Marlowe, which were sent to Queen Elizabeth in June, 1592, apparently, were from the mouth of one Richard Baine, who was hanged for felony two years after, and contained these words, perhaps pointing towards Ralegh: “That one Richard Cholmelei hath confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe’s reason to become an atheist. These things shall by good and honest men be proved to be his opinions and common speeches, and that this Marlowe doth not only hold them himself, but almost in every company he cometh, persuadeth men to atheism⁠—willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both God and his ministers⁠ ⁠… He saith, moreover, that he hath quoted a number of contrarieties out of the Scriptures, which he hath given to some great men, who in convenient time shall be named.” That Ralegh was one of these “great men” is highly probable; at any rate, the accusation of atheism was then secretly brought against him, and was likely to have weighed with Elizabeth. Ralegh, with Sidney, is believed to have been one of the English circle who associated with Giordano Bruno, during his short residence in England, a few years before Sidney’s death; and Bruno also made himself liable to a like charge of atheism. —⁠F. B. Sanborn ↩

These lines appear in “The Fourth Day of the First Week” of