Page:Scientific Monthly, volume 14.djvu/69

 in his colonial schemes, and two years before this letter of Hakluyt's he had sent Hariot out in the big expedition to Virginia, or to what is now North Carolina. There Hariot stayed for a full year, acting as ex plorer and surveyor and reversing his previous position in adding prac tice to his theory. After that year among the savages he came back to England and fell into the society of the keenest minds of his time. For Raleigh had been prevented from going to Virginia and while his argosies were oversea he had amused himself, in intervals of court ac tivities or fighting or retirement to the country, with an &quot;office of ad dress,&quot; apparently a sort of institution for the diffusion of knowledge and a liaison center for intellectuals. Whether or not this suggestion worked out in the Royal Society, there were in the group of men several scientists Warner and Hues are usually mentioned and into it came Hariot. But it was broader than a scientific society, as it would have to be to keep up with the interests of its patrons, Raleigh and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. It had its literary side, with the lead ing and outstanding figure of Christopher Marlowe. All information as to the group is exceptionally tenuous, resting largely on the gossip of contemporaries. But it is pretty clear that the members soon began to discuss religious subjects and it was here that they particularly scandalized the times. Rumors are thick about &quot;Sir Walter Rawley s School of Atheisme,&quot; 2 whose master was said to be a conjuror. The term of condemnation was very loosely used. There is nothing to show that Raleigh or Hariot had views more extreme than perhaps Unitarian or deistic ones and there is much evidence that they were religious in a broad and tolerant sense. But they were great per sonal friends of the scornful and heterodoxical Marlowe. It has been clearly shown by Mr. F. K. Brown 3 that the dramatic poet was a vigor ous exponent of extreme heresy and it was the expression of his views in reckless manner that caused the suppression of the club. Marlowe was killed before he could be convicted and probably the dagger saved him from the stake. Raleigh was kept under surveillance, his house searched, his private table-talk examined, and as he says, he was &quot;tum bled down the hill by every practise.&quot; But he was too powerful a man to sit still under the cloud. After a burst of eloquence in Parliament on behalf of religious toleration he set forth in an adventurous pursuit of El Dorado across the Spanish Main and cleared his blood by letting some of the dons. Hariot, just as much implicated, behaved very differently. It is probable that he went to one of Raleigh s Irish estates and there worked 2 See F. S. Boas, &quot;Works of Thomas Kyd,&quot; (Oxford, 1001), Introduc tion, pp. Ixx ff. 3 &quot;Marlowe and Kyd,&quot; Times Literary Supplement (London) June 2, 1921.