of God. He learnt it scholastically, from fathers and divines, as an
Oxford scholar, in days when Oxford was a Protestant indeed, in whom
there was no guile. He learnt it when he went over, at seventeen
years old, with his gallant kinsman Henry Champernoun, and his band
of a hundred gentlemen volunteers, to flesh his maiden sword in
behalf of the persecuted French Protestants. He learnt it as he
listened to the shrieks of the San Bartholomew; he learnt it as he
watched the dragonnades, the tortures, the massacres of the
Netherlands, and fought manfully under Norris in behalf of those
victims of 'the Pope and Spain.' He preached it in far stronger and
wiser words than I can express it for him, in that noble tract of
1591, on Sir Richard Grenville's death at the Azores--a Tyrtaean
trumpet-blast such as has seldom rung in human ears; he discussed it
like a cool statesman in his pamphlet of 1596, on 'A War with Spain.'
He sacrificed for it the last hopes of his old age, the wreck of his
fortunes, his just recovered liberty; and he died with the old God's
battle-cry upon his lips, when it awoke no response from the hearts
of a coward, profligate, and unbelieving generation. This is the
background, the keynote of the man's whole life. If we lose the
recollection of it, and content ourselves by slurring it over in the
last pages of his biography with some half-sneer about his putting,
like the rest of Elizabeth's old admirals, 'the Spaniard, the Pope,
and the Devil' in the same category, then we shall understand very
little about Raleigh; though, of course, we shall save ourselves the
trouble of pronouncing as to whether the Spaniard and the Pope were
really in the same category as the devil; or, indeed, which might be
equally puzzling to a good many historians of the last century and a
half, whether there be any devil at all.

The books which I have chosen to head this review are all of them