Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth’s successor, James I. He was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason.  The sentence hung over him until 1618, when it was revived against him and he was beheaded.  Meanwhile, during his twelve years’ imprisonment in the Tower, he had written his magnum opus, the History of the World.  This is not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of learned dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc.  A chapter with such a caption as the following would hardly be found in a universal history nowadays:  “Of their opinion which make Paradise as high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle regions of the air.”  The preface and conclusion are noble examples of Elizabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to Death.  “O eloquent, just and mighty Death!  Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, hic jacet.”

Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to be a poet.  Spenser calls him “the summer’s nightingale,” and George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy (1589), finds his “vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate.”  Puttenham used insolent in its old sense, uncommon; but this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning.  Raleigh’s most notable verses, The Lie, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life—­the saeva indignatio of Swift.  The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage.  It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the manuscripts or by tradition to have been “made by Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he was beheaded.”  Of one such poem the assertion is probably true—­namely, the lines “found in his Bible in the gate-house at Westminster.”

  Even such is Time, that takes in trust,
    Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
  And pays us but with earth and dust;
    Who in the dark and silent grave,
  When we have wandered all our ways,
  Shuts up the story of our days;
  But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
  My God shall raise me up, I trust!

The strictly literary prose of the Elizabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse.  Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped.  Fiction was represented—­outside of the Arcadia and Euphues already mentioned—­chiefly by tales translated or imitated from Italian novelle.  George Turberville’s Tragical Tales (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter’s