Top 15 Walter Raleigh Quotes

For some years after his death, his writings were held in huge esteem, and shaped the prose of England. That time has passed. New models have captured the public ear; and at this day Johnson's noble prose is perhaps studied chiefly by his parodists.

These Lives are the maturest and strongest of Johnson's work. It ought be a comfort to men past middle life to find Johnson, like Dryden, wrote his best prose in his latest years.

Those Elizabethan authors whose lives are fairly well known to us were always something other than mere authors—men of noble family, it may be, or distinguished in politics and war. We know more of Sir Walter Raleigh's career than of Shakespeare's, and more of Essex than of Spenser. On the other hand, while the works of Shakespeare and Spenser have come down to us almost in tact, most of the poems of Raleigh and Essex are lost. Men of position held professional authorship in some contempt, and wrote only for the delectation of their private friends.

The Dictionary was finished in 1755, and Johnson, compelled to find some new means of livelihood, returned to Shakespeare. ... The Proposals for Printing the Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare, which he issued in 1756, are magnificent in their range and discernment. The whole duty of a Shakespearian commentator and critic is here, for the first time, expounded. The complete collation of the early editions; the tracing of Shakespeare's knowledge to its sources; the elucidation of obscurities by a careful study of the language and customs of Shakespeare's time; the comparison of Shakespeare's work with that of other great poets, ancient and modern—all this and more is promised in the Proposals.

It is one of Boswell's greatest merits that he is careful of his background; wherever it is possible he gives us a full and true account of the persons present, and the incidents and remarks that prompted Johnson's speech.

A reporter remembers what he understands, and sets down what his readers will appreciate. The genius of Boswell appears not least in this, that that he was willing, on occasion, to record Johnson's most whimsical and irresponsible remarks. But he must have omitted or neglected by far the greater number. Those that he has preserved are perhaps the most delightful and convincing things in his book.

The Dictionary, great work though it be, might have been successfully carried through by a merely mechanical genius.

The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his library was burnt to the ground.

Because he had seen much of life, his last and greatest work, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, is more than a collection of facts: it is a book of wisdom and experience, a treatise on the conduct of life, a commentary on human destiny.

The topics of The Rambler are many, but the great majority of them are drawn from the graver aspects of life, and it is when he treats of fundamental duties and inevitable sorrows, bereavement, and disease, and death, that Johnson rises to his full stature.

The sense of liberty and power, and of belief in the capacity and destiny of man, which was quickened by the new discoveries, distinguishes the literature of the Elizabethan age from the great backward-looking periods of romance. It is a literature of youth and hope, with none of the subtle and poignant flavours that are to be tasted in a literature of regret and memory.

Over and against the plays of Shakespeare and his fellows, as their natural counterpart, must be set the Voyages of Hakluyt; he who would understand the Elizabethan age, and what it meant for England, must know them both.

Of all the notable Elizabethans, Sir Walter Raleigh is perhaps the most difficult to understand. He has the insolent imagination of Marlowe, and the profound melancholy of Donne.

Like Napoleon's Italian campaign, the achievements of Drake on the Spanish Main show a master at work, unburdened and unfettered as yet by responsibility and reputation, adapting himself solely to his material, and inventing at every stroke.

... these men, though there was little of saintliness in their character, had a religion, and fought and suffered for it. It was a religion not wholly unlike that of the later Orangeman, a Protestant compound, made up of fervid patriotism, a varied assortment of hates, a rough code of morals, and an unshaken trust in the providence of God. To the heathen they brought not peace but a sword. To the Pope, whom they named with the Turk and the Devil, they wished destruction. For Queen and Country they would go anywhere and attempt anything.