where now there spreads above his ashes "the dome of the golden cross." Of the many lines to his memory, none form a more fitting farewell than those written by his friend Sir Walter Raleigh : "England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same; Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried; CHAPTER VIII SIR WALTER RALEIGH THE stage on which men played their part in the age of Elizabeth seems to grow wider as we study the history of the time. We have Sir Thomas Gresham, in his busy world of finance, working out problems for the good of his fellow-citizens, in a world that went no farther than the distance from London to Antwerp; then we have Bacon, in his effort to rise always into the larger life of European politics; and Sidney, who bore abroad the ideal of English chivalry, and laid down his life upon a foreign battle-field; and beyond them all, forth into a land which his genius discovered, and from which his heart never swerved, moved the figure of Sir Walter Raleigh. If Sidney were the true picture of the Elizabethan soldier-hero, Raleigh was its ideal sailor. Sea-bred from his youth, on the wild Devonshire coast, and with the influence of his famous half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to quicken his 143 natural taste, he heard the music of sea-waves from his boyhood, and their influence was strong upon him throughout his life. To found a New England beyond the sea, that was his ambition; a colony that would grow, as ours of later days have done, to be a constant source of wealth to the Mother-country, and a tower of strength to her in times of peril. And side by side with this grand dream of his-for it became little more in his day than a dreamwas his other great and prevailing feeling, that of intense hatred to the Spanish Empire. These were the two ruling passions of Raleigh's life. His father also Sir Walter Raleigh-was the owner of the manor-house, Hayes Barton, near Budleigh Salterton, on the south Devonshire coast, and there the younger Walter was reared among a large family of half-brothers, as his mother had been married once and his father twice before. His own brother, Carew Raleigh, was older than himself. No home in England could have been better fitted to encourage thoughts of freedom and enterprise than the wild open moorlands, the rocky tors, and the tempting blue water of that Devonshire coast. As a child on the sea-shore he may have played beside Humphrey Gilbert, and learned |