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For all the opportunism, self-promotion, mis-judgment, and personal failure that undeniably mark his long career, Sir Walter Ralegh remains the most credible embodiment that Tudor-Stuart England has to offer of the ideal of the Renaissance man. By turns a soldier, privateer, explorer, and projector for colonization, he was as well a courtier, poet, scientist, and historian. Almost all his own poetry was written for self-advancement at court, yet he promoted unselfishly the fortunes of Edmund Spenser and facilitated the publication of Spenser's epic, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596). Though obviously cultivating a personal stake in his projects for colonization of the two Americas, he fixed those projects firmly in a larger perspective of advancing England's well-being in a world increasingly dominated by Spain; and his colonization plan, unlike the purely economic undertakings of the Spanish, included permanent settlement of families, the development of a nautical academy, and the learning of aboriginal languages, such as the Algonquian that his assistant, Thomas Harriot, remained on Roanoke Island for nearly a year to acquire.
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