One of the great qualities that was always present in the writings of Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the nineteenth century was its restraint.

Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect self-control.

The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became the noble mastery of himself.

When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which county you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the Tower of London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the next day at the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his beloved wife, with a piece of coal, because they even denied him pen and ink, face to face with death, he yet observed a calm and noble language that is truly magnifical—­to use the old Bible word.

“For the rest,” he wrote, “when you have travailed and wearied your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit down by sorrow in the end.  Teach your son also to serve and fear God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him.  Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you.

    “I cannot write much.  God knows how hardly I stole this time when
    all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world.

“Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my father and mother.  I can write no more.  Time and Death call me away.

“The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and Inscrutable God, that Almighty God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on me and teach me to forgive my persecutors and false accusers, and send us to meet in His Glorious Kingdom.  My true wife, farewell.  Bless my poor boy, pray for me.  My true God hold you both in His Arms.

    “Written with the dying hand of, sometime thy husband, but now
    alas! overthrown, yours that was, but now not my own.

    “Walter Ralegh.”

Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to his untimely end, had written in his great History of the World a wonderful passage about death; it is justly celebrated, and is familiar to all men of letters throughout the world, so I will quote a portion of it for you:—­

“The Kings and Princes of the world have always laid before them the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded them.  They are always transported with the glory of the one, but they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the experience in themselves.

“They neglect the advice of God, while they enjoy life, or the hope of it; but they follow the counsel of Death upon the first approach.  It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world,