powerful and competent aid. To collect, read, collate, note down, and
digest these vast and scattered treasures into reasonable and
presentable shape for the master mind, required not a bevy of poets and
parsons, but one masterly scholar of scientific, analytic, mathematical,
philosophical and religious training. Such a man was Hariot.

We read of Gibbon's twenty years' fag and toil on the materials of the
History of the Roman Empire alone, and at a time when there were many
aids not existing in Raleigh's day. Gibbon personally ransacked the
libraries of Europe. Raleigh had scarcely four years to cover the four
most ancient empires and a much longer period, and was himself confined
to Tower Hill. But he had at command a Hariot, a sort of winged Mercury,
who was neither entowered nor hide-bound with conceit or ignorance. He
was a marvellously good Greek and Latin scholar, who wrote Latin with
almost as much ease as English. One has but to read the vast number of
notes, citations and particular references in the History of the World
to see the height, depth, and perfect modelling of the structure.

Raleigh was unquestionably the designer, the architect and the finisher
of his History of the World. To him is due the honor and credit of the
work. But who was the builder ? The answer manifestly is Thomas Hariot
of Sion on Thames, learned, patient, self-forgetting, painstaking,
long-waiting, devoted Hariot. Many writers have claimed to be, or have
been named as, Sir Walter's assistants and polishers. Ben Jonson, Rev.
Dr Burhill, John Hoskins the poet, and others have each had their
advocates,but without sufficient evidence. It may well be questioned if
any one of them possessed either the ability, the time, the access to
the Tower, or the opportunity to perform such herculean labors of love.
These claims are apparently all based on pure conjecture, or unrectified
gossip, as shown by Mr Bolton Corney in his razorly reply to Mr Isaac