Politics & government > Life of Sir Walter Raleigh

292 from raleigh’s first confinement
shall do again. For had it been otherwise, I should
hardly have had this leisure to have made myself a fool
in print.” In a man who for many years had been the
victim of an unjust sentence, this tone of resignation is
infinitely more affecting than the language of indignant
remonstrance.
From this preface I am tempted to extract another
sentence, on the dignity and use of history, which is
finely written, “ It hath triumphed,” says he, “ over
time, which, besides it, nothing but eternity hath tri¬
umphed over; for it hath carried our knowledge over
the vast and devouring space of so many thousands of
years, and given so fair and piercing eyes to our mind,
that we plainly behold living now, as if we had lived
then, that great world, Magni Dei sapiens opus,—£ the
wise work,’ says Hermes, ‘ of a Great God,’ as it was then,
when hut new to itself. By it, I say, it is that we live
in the very time when it was created; we behold how
it was governed; how it was covered with waters, and
again repeopled; how kings and kingdoms have flourished
and fallen; and for what virtue and piety God made
prosperous, and for what vice and deformity he made
wretched, both the one and the other. And it is not the
least debt which we owe unto history, that it hath made
us acquainted with our dead ancestors ; and, out of the
depth and darkness of the earth delivered us their me¬
mory and fame. In a word, we may gather out of history
a policy no less wise than eternal, by the comparison and
application of other men’s forepast miseries with our own
like errors and ill-deservings.”*
To proceed now from the preface to the work itself,—
from the porch into that spacious and noble building to
which it conducts,—we find that it embraces the annals
of the world, from the creation to the termination of the
Second Macedonian War, giving “ the flower of recorded
story” through the three first great monarchies, and con¬
cluding with Rome triumphant in the fourth, about a
Preface, p. v.