INTRODUCTION
BY
FRANKLIN BENJAMIN SANBORN
The finding of a sketch of Sir Walter Ralegh (as he usually spelt his own name) among the manuscripts of Thoreau will be a surprise to most readers. But the subject lay along the lines of his earlier readings after leaving Harvard College, and the sketch, though not so early among his writings as The Service, edited by me in 1902, and those parts of The Week that first came out in The Dial (1840-44), belongs in that active and militant period of his life. It was probably prepared for publication in The Dial, and would have been published there, had not fate and the lack of paying subscribers abruptly stopped that quarterly in the summer of 1844.
The readings from Ralegh's History of the World began about 1842, as we see by
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