below a passage of critical opinion. How many reputations, within that
half-century, have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed!
We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor Hugo beyond
Homer. We have seen the latest freak of futurism preferred to _The Lotus
Eaters_, and the first _Légende des Siècles_ rejected as unreadable. In
face of this whirlwind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it
is on its head or its feet--"its trembling tent all topsy-turvy wheels,"
as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that security can only be found
in an incessant exploration of the by-ways of literary history and
analysis of the vagaries of literary character. To pursue this analysis
and this exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice is to
sum up the pleasures of a life devoted to books.

_August 1919._




THE SHEPHERD OF THE OCEAN[1]


Three hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir Walter Raleigh was
beheaded, in presence of a vast throng of spectators, on the scaffold of
Old Palace Yard in Westminster. General Gordon said that England is what
her adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English history a
more shining and violent specimen of the adventurous type than Raleigh.
I am desired to deliver a brief panegyric on this celebrated freebooter,
and I go behind the modern definition of the word "panegyric" (as a
pompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to its original significance,
which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a great assembly of persons,