Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/45

 say, 't was a great question, who was the proudest, Sir Walter or Sir Thomas Overbury, but the difference that was, was judged on Sir Thomas's side;" that "in his youth his companions were boisterous blades, but generally those that had wit;" that on one occasion he beats one of them for making a noise in a tavern, and "seals up his mouth, his upper and nether beard, with hard wax." A young contemporary says, "I have heard his enemies confess that he was one of the weightiest and wisest men that the island ever bred;" and another gives this character of him,—"who hath not known or read of this prodigy of wit and fortune, Sir Walter Raleigh, a man unfortunate in nothing else but in the greatness of his wit and advancement, whose eminent worth was such, both in domestic policy, foreign expeditions, and discoveries, in arts and literature, both practic and contemplative, that it might seem at once to conquer example and imitation."

And what we are told of his personal appearance is accordant with the rest,—that "he had in the outward man a good presence,