During the ten years which intervene between the date of Raleigh's first departure for the Continent and that of his beginning favour at home, already he had found means for ekeing out and perfecting that liberal education which Oxford had only begun for him, so that it was as a man of rarest literary accomplishments that he made his brilliant _debût_ at the English Court, where the new Elizabethan Age of Letters was just then beginning.
He became at once the centre of that little circle of highborn wits and poets, the elder wits and poets of the Elizabethan age, that were then in their meridian there. Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Edward Earl of Oxford, and some others, are included in the contemporary list of this courtly company, whose doings are somewhat mysteriously adverted to by a critic, who refers to the condition of 'the Art of Poesy' at that time. '_The gentleman who wrote the late Shepherds' Calendar_' was beginning then to attract considerable attention in this literary aristocracy.
The brave, bold genius of Raleigh flashed new life into that little nucleus of the Elizabethan development. The new '_Round Table_,' which that newly-beginning age of chivalry, with its new weapons and devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not yet 'full' till he came in. The Round Table grew rounder with this knight's presence. Over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was there to sing it. The Round Table grew spheral, as he sat talking by it; the Round Table dissolved, as he brought forth his lore, and unrolled his maps upon it; and instead of it,--with all its fresh yet living interests, tracked out by land and sea, with the great battle-ground of the future outlined on it,--revolved the round world. '_Universality_' was still the motto of these Paladins; but 'THE GLOBE'--the Globe, with its TWO hemispheres, became henceforth their device.