SOURCE: "The Elizabethan Lumber Room," in Collected Essays, Vol. I. Harourt, Brace & Company, 1966, pp. 46-53.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an influential modern British novelist and essayist associated with the Bloomsbury Group. In the following review essay, originally published in The Common Reader (1925), Woolf detects Hakluyt's influence on the English language, arguing that the "extravagance" and "hyperbole" of Elizabethan literature stems from the Elizabethan passion for discovery that was promoted by Hakluyt's publications.

These magnificent volumes [Hakluyt's Voyages] are not often, perhaps, read through. Part of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments, huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the dust off...