There may be an appearance of irreverence in the way in which he
contrasts the bribeless Hall of Heaven with the proceedings at his own
trial, where he was browbeaten, abused, and, from the very commencement,
treated as a guilty man by Sir Edward Coke, the king's attorney. He even
puns with the words _angels_ and _fees_. Burning from a sense of
injustice, however, and with the solemnity of death before him, he could
not be guilty of _conscious_ irreverence, at least. But there is another
remark I have to make with regard to the matter, which will bear upon
much of the literature of the time: even the great writers of that period
had such a delight in words, and such a command over them, that like
their skilful horsemen, who enjoyed making their steeds show off the
fantastic paces they had taught them, they played with the words as they
passed through their hands, tossing them about as a juggler might his
balls. But even herein the true master of speech showed his masterdom:
his play must not be by-play; it must contribute to the truth of the idea
which was taking form in those words. We shall see this more plainly when
we come to transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no
irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh
should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much
coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh
was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing
verses, describes him truly when he says:
I saw in every stander-by
Pale death, life only in thy eye.
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