4. There is a pleasant legend that Raleigh and one of his half-brothers were riding up to town from Plymouth, when Raleigh's horse stumbled and threw him within the precincts of a beautiful Dorsetshire estate, then in possession of the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury, and that Raleigh, choosing to consider that he had thus taken seisin of the soil, asked the Queen for Sherborne[1] Castle when he arrived at Court. It may have been on this occasion that Elizabeth asked him when he would cease to be a beggar, and received the reply, "When your Majesty ceases to be a benefactor." [Gosse.]
5. This passage about Alexander and Epaminondas is preceded in Ralegh, as copied by Thoreau in the scrap-book, by some general remarks on that remarkable quality in a few men which Ralegh seems to have felt in himself, which, as he wrote, "Guided handfuls of men against multitudes of equal bodily strength, contrived victories beyond all hope and discourse of reason, converted the fearful passions of his own followers into magnanimity, and the valor of his enemies into cowardice. Such spirits have been stirred up in sundry ages of the world, and in divers parts thereof, to erect and cast down again, to establish and to destroy, and to bring all things, persons and states to the same certain ends which the infinite Spirit
- ↑ Sherborne came into Ralegh's possession in 1592.—ed.
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