138 TWO CHAPTERS ILLUSTRATIVE OF 



increased, when he had been told that that miracle of juridical learn- 

 ing, Sir Edward Coke himself affirmed that those noble statutes 

 were no longer in force, which it is well known exacted that no 

 mortal judge should consign a fellow creature to death without the 

 witnesses being brought into open court, face to face before the 

 accused ! Well might the able and learned prisoner exclain, " You 

 try me then by the Spanish Inquisition, if you proceed on examina- 

 tion, not on witnesses." The jurist-consult would also mourn, that 

 Coke, who acted on this memorable trial as attorney general, in his 

 overboiling animosity and hatred towards Raleigh — for the epithets 

 monster, vile viper, execrable traitor, spider of hell, damnable athe- 

 ist,*' were applied by him to the prisoner, in his opening speech — 



most upright man was a great advocate for the distribution of uncostly jus- 

 tice, and from his remarks on Colledge's trial, appears to have held in dis- 

 trust the private opinions of king's counsel on great constitutional points, con- 

 ceiving " that they made themselves partys in such matters.'' — See 8 St. 

 Tr., 7-'3. 



* Most unjustly, Sir Walter has passed with his contemporaries for a free- 

 thinker; which opinion Mr. Hume has sought to perpetuate by charging 

 him with infidelity — a charge which came with no peculiar fitness from this 

 quarter ; and many writers, upon his authority, have chosen to take from 

 him the noblest prerogative of his nature, that of being " a religious animal.''' 

 Dr. Parr, who has examined the writing; of Raleigh attentively, has rebuked 

 Mr. Butler for adopting that notion of the sceptic historian : — " Why do you 

 follow Hume, in representing llaleigh as an infidel ? For heaven's sake, 

 dear Sir, look to his Preface to his Histoiy of the World ; look at his Letters 

 in a little ISmo, and here, but here only, you will find a tract which led 

 Hume to talk of Raleigh as an unbeliever. It is an epitome of the princi- 

 ples of the old sceptics ; and to me, who, like Dr. Clarke and Mr. Hume, am 

 a reader of Sextus Empiricus, it is very intelligible. Indeed, Mr. Butler, it 

 is a most ingenious performance : but mark me well — it is a mere lusus inge- 

 niV — Butler's Reminiscences, vol. ii, p. 232. But did not the writings of 

 this remarkable person contain internal proof of the habitual conviction of 

 his mind that Christianity was true, the weight of evidence and argument in 

 favour of Raleigh being a believing christian is great from this fact alone, 

 that the companion of his studies and sharer of his toils in the new world, 

 Thomas Hariot, was eminently such. " Many times," says he, " and in 

 everv towne where I came, according as I was able, I made declaration of 

 the contents of the Bible, that therein was set forth the true and onely God 

 and his mightie workes ; that therein was contained the true doctrine of sal- 

 vation through Christ, with many particularities of miracles and chiefe points 

 of religion, as I was able then to utter and thought fit tor the time. And 

 although I told them the book materially and of itself was not of any such 

 virtue, as I thought they did conceive, but onely the doctrine therein con- 

 teined, yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to show 

 their hungry desire of that knowledge which was spoken of." — Harriot's 



