never be divided from action without paying heavy penalties. Only by keeping firm hold of that guarantee of sincerity which is supplied by the deed done can it steer clear of the slippery pitfall of rhetoric. But action is not dependent on poetry; and the inarticulate generations who inherited and carried on the work celebrated in the Book of Voyages played for higher stakes than praise. It was almost an accident that the book was made; the dynasty of Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher would have established its reign had it never found a chronicler. In Reprints 1736 proposals were issued for a reprint of Hakluyt, but support was lacking, and the scheme fell through. The first reprint, numbering three hundred and twenty-five copies, did not appear till 1811. It is the high reward of great deeds that they can afford to be forgotten. Fame is a luxury, if not a vanity. By secret and unconscious methods of initiation, by that unwritten tradition which descends from father to son, by the law of nature which gives currency to inherent value no matter whose the superscrip of Hakluyt's book. of failure. tion, the ideas and aims of the great Elizabethan seamen have become the creed of the British Empire. Yet Hakluyt's book, though it has little to do with the history of letters, gives, to those who care to read, a rare opportunity of insight into the hidden processes of the making of a nation. When it was first published all A record that had been imagined and attempted, at the cost of so many years of effort and so many men's lives, was yet to do. No thoroughfare had been discovered by the North East or the North West. No English community had been established oversea. No gold-mine was in the possession of England. The Spanish power was stronger on the seas than it had been before the Armada. So far the record is one of failure. But on the other side of the account there is an item which cannot be neglected. It is to be The found in those long and dull lists of unknown of success. names, of merchant promoters, gentlemen adventurers, intending colonists, and ship's companies, which give so business-like an air to Hakluyt's pages. It may be true, as someone has said, that these detailed summaries 'leave as little warrant impression of excitement or emulation upon our minds as so many almanacks.' But they held in them the promise of Empire. The ideas of colonial expansion and of the command of the sea had captured the nation; the seeds had been scattered, and were germinating in tens of thousands of minds. From the sea England had been peopled by successive waves of conquest or immigration; to the sea, after a long interval, she gave back a race who had learned that there and there alone could her safety be made good and her name upheld. As a people -to borrow a phrase from the poetry of common speech-we follow the sea; it will be an ill day for us when the tides that wash the world run their ancient courses, and we may not follow. INDEX. Albion, Nova, account of the Countries, 39, 79. Ambassador, English, at Antonio, Don, and Richard Azores Islands, settlements Babylon, English Consul at, touching a War with Spain' Baffin Bay, Captain Davis Bajazet, Emperor, defeat of, Barlow, Arthur, Captain, sent Blake, William, 189. 132. Buccaneers, religion of Eng- Burghley, see Cecil, Sir (1497), 13. Cabot, Sebastian, voyages of, Cacafuego, the, Spanish ship, Cadiz, harbour, 98, 104. Cannibals, essay of Mon- sacked by Sir Francis Cartier, Jacques, of S. Malo, Cecil, Sir Robert, dedication Cecil, Sir William, Lord covery of S. Nicholas in Chapman, 'De Guiana Carmen epicum' Chavez, Hieronymo or Gero- Clifford, George, Earl of Colonising, plan for, of Sid- Columbus, Christopher, story Constantinople, English Am- Contractation House, or Ex- Corbett, Julian, 'Drake and |