up into the Greenland seas till he was blocked by the ice, then coasted back to Florida, and returned with the news of another continent waiting to be occupied. The English mariners turned away with indifference; their own soil and their own seas had been sufficient for the wants of their fathers; their fathers had more wit and wisdom than they;' and it was left to Spain, in that grand burst of energy which followed on the expulsion of the Moors and the union of the crowns, to add a hemisphere to the known world and found empires in lands beyond the sunset.

Strange indeed was the contrast between the two races, and stranger still the interchange of character, as we look back over three hundred years. Before the sixteenth century had measured half its course the shadow of Spain already stretched beyond the Andes; from the mines of Peru and the custom-houses of Antwerp, the golden rivers streamed into her Imperial treasury; the crowns of Arragon and Castile, of Burgundy, Milan, Naples, and Sicily, clustered on the brow of her sovereigns; and the Spaniards themselves, before their national liberties were broken, were beyond comparison the noblest, grandest, and most enlightened people in the known world.

The spiritual earthquake shook Europe: the choice of the ways was offered to the nations; on the one side liberty, with the untried possibilities of anarchy and social dissolution; on the other the reinvigoration of the creeds and customs of ten centuries, in which Christendom had grown to its present stature.

Fools and dreamers might follow their ignis fatuus till it led them to perdition: the wise Spaniard took his stand on the old ways. He too would have his reformation, with an inspired Santa Teresa for a prophetess, an army of ascetics to combat with prayer the legions of the evil one, a most holy Inquisition to put away the enemies of God with sword and dungeon, stake and fire. That was the Spaniard's choice, and his intellect shrivelled in his brain, and the sinews shrank in his self-bandaged limbs; and only now at last, with such imperfect deliverance as they have found in French civilization and Voltairian philosophy, is the life-blood stealing again into the veins of the descendants of the conquerors of Granada.

Meanwhile a vast intellectual revolution, of which the religious reformation was rather a sign than a cause, was making its way in the English mind. The discovery of the form of the earth and of its place in the planetary system, was producing an effect on the imagination which long familiarity with the truth renders it hard for us now to realize. The very heaven itself had been rolled up like a scroll, laying bare the illimitable abyss of space; the solid frame of the earth had become a transparent ball, and in a hemisphere below their feet men saw the sunny Palm Isles and the golden glories of the tropic seas. Long impassive, long unable from the very toughness of their natures to apprehend these novel wonders, indifferent to them, even hating them as at first they hated the doctrines of Luther, the English opened their eyes at last. In the convulsions which rent Eng

land from the Papacy a thousand superstitions were blown away, a thousand new thoughts rushed in, bringing with them their train of new desires and new emotions; and when the fire was once kindled, the dry wood burnt fiercely in the wind.

Having thrown down the gauntlet to the Pope, Henry the Eighth had to look to the defences of the kingdom; and knowing that his best security lay in the command of the 'broad ditch,' as he called it, which cut him off from Europe, he turned his mind with instant sagacity to the development of the navy. Long before indeed, when Anne Boleyn was a child, and Wolsey was in the zenith of his greatness, and Henry was the Pope's 'Defender of the Faith,' he had quickened his slumbering dockyards into life, studied naval architecture, built ships on new models, and cast unheard-of cannon. Giustiniani in 1518 found him practising at Southampton with his new brass artillery. The 'Great Harry' was the wonder of Northern Europe; and the fleet afterwards collected at Spithead, when D'Annebault brought his sixty thousand Frenchmen to the Isle of Wight, and the 'Mary Rose' went down under Henry's eyes, was the strongest, proudest, and best formed which had yet floated in English waters.

The mariners and merchants had caught the impulse of the time. In 1530, when the divorce question was in its early stages, Mr William Hawkins of Plymouth, ‘a man for his wisdom, valour, experience, and skill of sea causes much esteemed and beloved of King Henry the Eighth,'' armed out a tall and goodly ship,' sailed for

the coast of Guinea, where he first trafficked with the negroes for gold dust and ivory, and then crossed the Atlantic to Brazil, where he behaved himself so wisely with the savage people' that the King of Brazil' came back with him to see the wonders of England, and was introduced to Henry at Whitehall. The year after, Hawkins went back again, and 'the King' with him; the King on the passage home died of change of air, bad diet, and confinement; and there were fears for the Englishmen who had been left as hostages among the Indians. But they were satisfied that there had been no foul play; they welcomed Englishmen as cordially as they hated the Spaniards; and a trade was opened which was continued chiefly by the merchants of Southampton.

In 1549 Sebastian Cabot, who in his late manhood had returned to Bristol, was appointed by Edward the Sixth Grand Pilot of England; and as enterprise expanded with freedom and with the cracking up of superstition, the merchant adventurers, who had started up in London on principles of free trade, and who were to the established guilds as the Protestants to the Catholic bishops, sent their ships up the Straits to the Levant, explored the Baltic, and had their factors at Novgorod. In 1552 Captain Windham of Norfolk followed William Hawkins to the coast of Guinea, and again in 1553, with Antonio Pinteado, he led a second expedition to the Bight of Benin and up the river to the Court of the King. The same year the noble Sir Hugh Willoughby, enchanted like John Cabot with visions of the Islands

of Cathay,' sailed in search of them into the Arctic circle, turned eastward into the frozen seas, and perished in the ice.

But neither the 'frost giants' of the north nor the deadly vapours of the African rivers could quell the spirit which had been at last aroused. Windham and Pinteado died of fever in the Benin waters; and of a hundred and forty mariners who sailed with them, forty only ever saw Ramhead and Plymouth Sound again; but the year following John Lok was tempted to the same shores by the ivory and gold dust; and he-first of Englishmen-discovering that the negroes 'were a people of beastly living, without God, law, religion, or commonwealth,' gave some of them the opportunity of a lift in creation, and carried off five as slaves.

It is noticeable that on their first appearance on the west coast of Africa, the English visitors were received by the natives with marked cordiality. The slave trade hitherto had been a monopoly of the Spaniards and Portuguese; it had been established in concert with the native chiefs, as a means of relieving the tribes of bad subjects, who would otherwise have been hanged. Thieves, murderers, and such like, were taken down to the depôts and sold to the West Indian traders.1 But

1 When they (the negroes of the | them. There they sit to examine Rio Grande) sit in council in the consultation-house, the king or captain sitteth in the midst and the elders upon the floor by him (for they give reverence to their elders), and the common sort sit round about

matters of theft, which if a man be taken with, to steal but a Portugal cloth from another, he is sold to the Portugal for a slave.'—HAKLUYT, vol. iii. p. 599.