Of all the famous Elizabethans Sir Walter Raleigh is the most
romantically interesting. His splendid and varied gifts, his chequered
fortunes, and his cruel end, will embalm his memory in English history.
But Raleigh's great accomplishments promised more than they performed.
His hand was in everything, but of work successfully completed he had
less to show than others far his inferiors, to whom fortune had offered
fewer opportunities. He was engaged in a hundred schemes at once, and in
every one of them there was always some taint of self, some personal
ambition or private object to be gained. His life is a record of
undertakings begun in enthusiasm, maintained imperfectly, and failures
in the end. Among his other adventures he had sent a colony to Virginia.
He had imagined, or had been led by others to believe, that there was an
Indian Court there brilliant as Montezuma's, an enlightened nation
crying to be admitted within the charmed circle of Gloriana's subjects.
His princes and princesses proved things of air, or mere Indian savages;
and of Raleigh there remains nothing in Virginia save the name of the
city which is called after him. The starving survivors of his settlement
on the Roanoke River were taken on board by Drake's returning squadron
and carried home to England, where they all arrived safely, to the glory
of God, as our pious ancestors said and meant in unconventional
sincerity, on the 28th of July, 1586.
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