33 JOHN GOODYER 



quoted, dated by Goodyer from his lodging at the Red 

 Lyon in Fleet Street, on the 7 of November 161 8. 

 ' Even such is tyme, that takes in trust 



Our youth, our ioyes and all we have 



And paies us but with age and dust 



Who in the darke and silent grave 



When we have wanderd all our waies 



Shutts uppe the storie of our daies 



And from which earth and grave and dust 



The Lord shall raise me uppe I trust.' [MS. f. 2 

 Being, regrettably, unfamiliar with the poem I consulted 

 my friend Sir Walter Raleigh, our Professor of English 

 Literature, in the confident expectation that he would 

 identify it for me. The strange coincidence could hardly 

 have been anticipated that the lines should be known as 

 the ' Last Poem of Sir Walter Raleigh ' of Elizabethan 

 fame. There is a tradition that they were written in the 

 Tower, shortly before the execution, but whether this be 

 so or not, it is surely remarkable that Goodyer should have 

 had a copy on the back of a letter written within a few 

 days of the execution on 28 October 161 8. 



As a twelve-year old boy Goodyer must have heard of 

 the infamous trial at Winchester, when the people first 

 pelted Raleigh with tobacco pipes and later were won over 

 by the eloquence of his defence and the dauntlessness of 

 his bearing. He would assuredly have taken a sympathetic 

 interest in his great contemporary not only for his heroic 

 career, but as a pioneer familiar with the splendours of the 

 tropical vegetation of the New World. Goodyer's Arti- 

 choke culture was perhaps modelled on that of the Potato. 

 Whether he was a smoker, we do not know, but about 

 161 8 he paid ^d. for 'tabaco', apparently at Alresford. 

 It was only a few years before, that James I had stigmatized 

 smoking as ' a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the 

 nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in 

 the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the 

 horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless '. 



