God's most candid critics are those of his children whom he has made poets. - Walter Raleigh

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.

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.

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.