Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/44

 one whose virtues if they were not distinctively great yet gave to virtues a current stamp and value as it were by the very grace and loftiness with which he carried them;—one of nature's noblemen who possessed those requisites to true nobility without which no heraldry nor blood can avail. Among savages he would still have been chief. He seems to have had, not a profounder or grander but, so to speak, more nature than other men,—a great, irregular, luxuriant nature, fit to be the darling of a people. The enthusiastic and often extravagant, but always hearty and emphatic, tone in which he is spoken of by his contemporaries is not the least remarkable fact about him, and it does not matter much whether the current stories are true or not, since they at least prove his reputation. It is not his praise to have been a saint or a seer in his generation, but "one of the gallantest worthies that ever England bred." The stories about him testify to a character rather than a virtue. As, for instance, that "he was damnable proud. Old Sir Robert Harley of Brampton-Brian Castle (who knew him) would