Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II SIR WALTEE RALEIGH AND HIS TIME1 ' Truth is stranger than fiction.' A trite remark. We all say it again and again: but how few of xis believe it! How few of us, when we read the history of heroical times and heroical men, take the story simply as it stands! On the contrary, we try to explain it away; to prove it all not to have been so very wonderful; to impute accident, circumstance, mean and commonplace motives; to lower every story down to the level of our own littleness, or what we (unjustly to ourselves and to the God who is near us all) choose to consider our level; to rationalise away all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to believe them; and prove to our own melancholy satisfaction that Alexander conquered the world with a pin, in his sleep, by accident. 1 North British Keview, No. XLV.—1. ' Life of Sir "Walter Raleigh.' By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S. London, 1853.—2. ' Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana.' Edited by Sir Robert Sehomburgk (Hakluyt Society), 1848.—3. ' Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.' By M. Napier. Cambridge, 1853.—4. ' Raleigh's Works, with Lives by Oldys and Birch.' Oxford, 1829.—5. ' Bishop Goodman's History of his own Times.' London, 1839. And yet in this mood, as in most, there is a sort of left-handed truth involved. These heroes are not so far removed from us after all. They were men of like passions with ourselves, with the same flesh about them, the same spirit within them, the same world outside, the same devil beneath, the same God above. They and their deeds were not so very wonderful. Every child who is born into the world is just as wonderful, and, for aught we know, might, mutatis mutandis, do just as wonderful deeds. If accident and circumstance helped them, the same may help us: have helped us, ...