BY SIR WALTER RALEIGH (1614)[A]


How unfit and how unworthy a choice I have made of myself, to
undertake a work of this mixture, mine own reason, though exceeding
weak, hath sufficiently resolved me. For had it been begotten then
with my first dawn of day, when the light of common knowledge began to
open itself to my younger years, and before any wound received either
from Fortune or Time, 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. For, beginning with the Creation, I have proceeded
with the History of the World; and lastly purposed (some few sallies
excepted) to confine my discourse with this our renowned Island of
Great Britain. I confess that it had better sorted with my disability,
the better part of whose times are run out in other travails, to have
set together (as I could) the unjointed and scattered frame of our
English affairs, than of the universal 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. But those inmost and soul-piercing wounds, which are ever
aching while uncured; with the desire to satisfy those few friends,
which I have tried by the fire of adversity, the former enforcing,
the latter persuading; have caused me to make my thoughts legible, and
myself the subject of every opinion, wise or weak.

To the world I present them, to which I am nothing indebted: neither
have others that were, (Fortune changing) sped much better in any
age. For prosperity and adversity have evermore tied and untied vulgar
affections. And as we see it in experience, that dogs do always bark