RALPH, JAMES. 



RAMAZZINI, BERNARDO. 



20 



observes that ho is " less pedantic than most of his contemporaries, 

 seldom low, and never affected." The first part of the ' History of the 

 World,' which is all that Sir Walter Raleigh completed, ia contained 

 in five books, commencing with the creation, and ending with the 

 second Macedonian war, about 150 years before Christ. It was his 

 intention to continue the history in two more volumes, which he 

 Bays, " I also intended, and have hewn out ; " but the death of Prince 

 Henry, to whom the book was 'directed,' and who had always shown 

 a warm interest in hia fortunes, " besides many other discourage- 

 ments, persuaded him to silence." 



In 1615, Cecil being dead, and Somerset disgraced, Raleigh bribed 

 the uncles of Buckingham, the new favourite, and induced Sir Ralph 

 Winwood to recommend his project of opening a mine in Guiana. 

 Upon this he was released conditionally. He equipped thirteen 

 vessels for this expedition, which, from the magnitude of the under- 

 taking and the celebrity of his name, attracted much attention, and 

 Raleigh's ship was visited by all the foreign ambassadors. The fleet 

 reached the Coast of Guiana about the middle of November 1617. 

 Raleigh was so unwell that he could not ascend the Orinoco in person. 

 Captain Keymis, the steady follower of Raleigh, led the exploring 

 party, consisting of five companies of fifty soldiers each. A conflict 

 took place with the Spaniards near St. Thomas, a small town recently 

 built, in which the Spanish governor and Raleigh's eldest son Walter 

 were slain ; after which Keymis, having spent about twenty days in 

 a fruitless search for the icine, and suffered considerable loss, returned 

 to the fleet. Keymis, meeting with nothing but reproaches for his 

 ill success, committed suicide. Raleigh sailed for Newfoundland to 

 victual and refit ; intending possibly to return to Guiana, but cer- 

 tainly in the meantime to attack the Spanish plate fleet, if he could 

 fall in with it. Before he could reach Newfoundland the fleet sepa- 

 rated, and on his arriving there, his own crew mutinied, and the 

 majority declaring for a return to England, he was forced to accom- 

 pany them. He arrived at Plymouth in July 1618, and a proclamation 

 being issued by the king against him, he was shortly after arrested by 

 Sir Lewis Stukely, vice-admiral of Devonshire. He was conveyed to 

 London, and on his journey made some ineffectual attempts to escape, 

 and at Salisbury he feigned sickness. James, strongly urged by the 

 king of Spain to punish Raleigh for his attack on St. Thomas, and 

 being anxious to gratify that monarch, in order to advance the 

 marriage of his son Charles with the infanta, laid the case before his 

 council, when it was argued that Raleigh, being under an unpardoned 

 sentence for treason, was civilly dead, and accordingly could not be 

 tried again. James, bent on somehow sacrificing Raleigh, readily 

 adopted this view, and resolved to carry into execution a sentence 

 sixteen years old, which had been followed by an imprisonment of 

 thirteen years. Raleigh was brought up before the Court of King's 

 Bench to receive sentence on the 28th of October 1618, and beheaded 

 the next morning, in the sixty-sixth year of his age. His conduct 

 after his committal to the Tower, and up to the moment of his death, 

 was so calm and resigned, as to move the sympathy even of his 

 enemies. 



Of Sir Walter Raleigh's character and personal appearance, Aubrey 

 says, " he was a tall, handsome, and bold man, but his naeve was that 

 he was damnable proud : he had a most remarkable aspect, an exceed- 

 ing high forehead, long-faced, and ' sour eie-lidded, a kind of pigge- 

 eie.' " In an age of magnificence in dress, Raleigh was conspicuous 

 for his splendour. Of an original and versatile genius, an eminent 

 commander by sea and land, a navigator and discoverer of new 

 countries, an accomplished courtier, a statesman, a proficient in the 

 mechanical arts, a poet of no mean ability, Sir Walter Raleigh was 

 one of the most remarkable characters of an ago celebrated for its 

 eminent men. Not much perhaps can be said in favour of his moral 

 character : he was crafty and rapacious, and his conduct was not 

 regulated by truth and probity ; but he had kindly affections, and was 

 much beloved by his dependants. Sir Walter was the author of many 

 smaller pieces on a variety of subjects, philosophical, political, naval, 

 military, geographical, besides letters, and a collection of small poems. 

 He had two sons by his wife : the elder was killed in South America ; 

 the second, Carew, who was born in the Tower, survived him. 



RALPH, JAMES, was born at Philadelphia, in what year is not 

 recorded, and passed the earlier part of his life there as a school- 

 master. In 1725 he came to England in company with his townsman 

 Benjamin Franklin. What was the nature of his occupation is 

 unknown. He has been supposed to have had some employment 

 about the court, but he more probably got his living by writing in 

 the newspapers. In the first book of the 'Dunciad,' published in 

 1728, Pope mentions him as one of Walpole's 'gazetteers.' This same 

 year appeared Ralph's fiist separate and acknowledged literary per- 

 formance, a poem, entitled 'Night.' It is to this work that Pope 

 alludes in the third book of the ' Dunciad,' where he exclaims 



" Silence, ye wol/es, while Ralph to Cynthia howle, 

 And makes night hideous ; answer him, ye owls ! " 



To this passage is appended a note, in which Ralph is denounced as 

 the author of " a swearing piece called ' Sawney,' " which it appears 

 was an attack upon Pope and his two friends Swift and Gay. In this 

 note he is declared to be wholly illiterate as well as venal, but an 

 admirer in the 'Biographia Dramatica ' says, " It is very certain that 



he was master of the French and Latin languages, and not altogether 

 ignorant of the Italian; and was in truth a very ingenious prose 

 writer, although he did not succeed as a poet." His dramatic 

 writings are 'The Fashionable Lady, or Harlequin's Opera,' pro- 

 duced at the theatre in Goodman's Fields, in 1730, with some success. 

 ' The Fall of the Earl of Essex,' a tragedy (altered from the ' Unhappy 

 Favourite' of John Bankes), brought out at the same house in 1731 ; 

 the ' Lawyer's Feast,' a farce, performed at Drury-Lane in 1744; and 

 the 'Astrologer,' a comedy, "once acted," says the title-page "at 

 Drury-Lane," also in 1744. 'The Astrologer' 'was only an alteration 

 of an old play, called ' Albumazar,' written by a Mr. Tomkis, of 

 Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1615. Auother of his latter publica- 

 tions was a tract, entitled 'The Case of Authors;' it was probably 

 an argument for the protection of dramatic copyrights ; though his 

 own do not seem to have been in much danger of infringement. 



Most of Ralph's publications however were political pamphlets 

 on the topics of the day ; and he is also supposed to have continued 

 to be an active contributor to the public journals to the end of his life. 

 He attached himself latterly to the faction of the Prince of Wales, 

 and frequent mention of him may be found in Bubb Dodington's 

 ' Diary : ' Horace Walpole, in hia ' Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of 

 George II.,' also under date of 2nd of June 1753, gives an account of 

 his journalising. According to this statement, Ralph " had the good 

 fortune to be bought off from his last journal, the ' Protester,' for the 

 only paper that he did not write in it." Other accounts however 

 make him to have been 'taken off' by a pension towards the end of 

 Sir Robert Walpole's time, in consequence of having then made him- 

 self so formidable to the ministry. The death of Prince Frederick 

 (in March 1751) was an annihilating blow for the moment to Ralph, as 

 well as to his patron Dodington, who had promised to make him his 

 secretary if he should live to have the seals of secretary of state for 

 the southern department, which the prince had engaged to give him 

 ('Diary,' July 18 and 19, 1749); but it is said that he obtained a con- 

 siderable sum from the government for the surrender of an important 

 manuscript written by the prince, or under his royal highness' s 

 direction, which had come into hia possession. Ou the accession of 

 George III., he got another pension, which however he did not long 

 enjoy, for he died of gout at his house in Chiswick, 24th January 1762. 

 Of his political pamphlets, the only one which is now remembered is 

 his answer to the Duchess of Marlborough's famous ' Account of her 

 Conduct,' an octavo volume of four hundred and sixty-seven pages, 

 entitled ' The Other Side of the Question, or au Attempt to rescue 

 the Characters of the Two Royal Sisters, Queen Mary and Queen 



Anne, out of the hands of the D s D of , in which all 



the Remarkables in her Grace's late Account are stated in their full 

 strength, and as fully answered ; the conduct of several noble persons 

 is justified; and all the necessary lights are thrown on our Court 

 history from the Revolution to the change in the ministry in 1710 : 

 in a letter to her Grace, by a Woman of Quality,' London, 1742. 

 This is the ablest and most important of the various answers and 

 defences which her grace's publication drew forth; and some things in 

 it appear to have been supplied by the family of the late Earl of 

 Oxford (the lord-treasurer Harley). Ralph is also the author of 

 another anonymous work (published indeed without the name of either 

 printer or bookseller) entitled ' Of the Use and Abuse of Parliaments ; in 

 Two Discourses, viz. 1, A General View of Government in Europe ; 2, 

 A Detection of the Parliaments of England from the year 1660.' 2 vols. 

 Svo, London, 1744. In an advertisement we are informed that the 

 first of the two discourses, which however filla only seventy-eight 

 pages of the first volume, is from the pen of Algernon Sydney. The 

 rest of the book is a hasty performance, and of little value. But 

 his principal work, also anonymous, is his continuation of Guthrie's 

 History, entitled a ' History of England during the Reigns of King 

 William, Queen Anne, and King George I. ; with an Introductory 

 Review of the Reigns of the Royal Brothers, Charles and Janies ; in 

 which are to be found the seeds of the Revolution. By a Lover of 

 Truth and Liberty : ' 2 vols. fol., London, 1744-46. Notwithstanding 

 a systematic depreciation of King William, which runs through a 

 great part of it, this work is written with spirit and acuteness, and 

 contains many new facts and corrections of the views of the preceding 

 historians. 



RAMAZZFNI, BERNARDO, was bom at Carpi, near Modena, in 

 1633. He studied medicine at Parma, and took his doctor's degree 

 there in 1659. He practised successively at Carpi and at Modeiia ; 

 and when the university of the latter place was instituted, he was 

 appointed professor of the theory of medicine by the Duke Francis II. 

 In 1700 he was invited to the second professorship of medicine at 

 Padua, and in 1708 was raised to the principal chair there, though 

 bund and so infirm that he earnestly desired to decline that honour. 

 He died in 1714. 



Ramazzini was a frequent writer and a very warm controversialist 

 both in medical and literary subjects. His first work was a series of 

 letters in an acrimonious controversy with Moneglia, a physician of 

 Modena. The works by which Rauiazzmi ia now best known are 'De 

 inorbia artificum diatriba,' Mutiu., 1770, and ' De abusu chinas-china) 

 diss. epist.' The former was translated into several languages, and 

 among them into English in 1725. It contains a description of all 

 the diseases to which each class of artificers is liable, as far as they 



