Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/49

 dangling at his side. Born in 1552, the last year of the reign of Edward VI, we find that not long after, by such instinct as makes the young crab seek the seashore, he has already marched into France, as one of "a troop of a hundred gentlemen volunteers," who are described as "a gallant company, nobly mounted and accoutred, having on their colors the motto, Finem det mihi virtus—'Let valor be my aim. And so in fact he marched on through life with this motto in his heart always. All the peace of those days seems to have been but a truce, or casual interruption of the order of war. War with Spain, especially, was so much the rule rather than the exception that the navigators and commanders of these two nations, when abroad, acted on the presumption that their countries were at war at home, though they had left them at peace; and their respective colonies in America carried on war at their convenience, with no infraction of the treaties between the mother countries. Raleigh seems to have regarded the Spaniards as his natural enemies, and he was not backward to develop this part of his