Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, in three volumes, appeared first in 1589, and a second edition followed in 1598-1600.  The first volume tells of voyages to the north; the second to India and the East; the third, which is as large as the other two, to the New World.  With the exception of the very first voyage, that of King Arthur to Iceland in 517, which is founded on a myth, all the voyages are authentic accounts of the explorers themselves, and are immensely interesting reading even at the present day.  No other book of travels has so well expressed the spirit and energy of the English race, or better deserves a place in our literature.

Samuel Purchas, who was also a clergyman, continued the work of Hakluyt, using many of the latter’s unpublished manuscripts and condensing the records of numerous other voyages.  His first famous book, Purchas, His Pilgrimage, appeared in 1613, and was followed by Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, in 1625.  The very name inclines one to open the book with pleasure, and when one follows his inclination—­which is, after all, one of the best guides in literature—­he is rarely disappointed.  Though it falls far below the standard of Hakluyt, both in accuracy and literary finish, there is still plenty to make one glad that the book was written and that he can now comfortably follow Purchas on his pilgrimage.

THOMAS NORTH.  Among the translators of the Elizabethan Age Sir Thomas North (1535?-1601?) is most deserving of notice because of his version of Plutarch’s Lives (1579) from which Shakespeare took the characters and many of the incidents for three great Roman plays.  Thus in North we read: 

Caesar also had Cassius in great jealousy and suspected him much:  whereupon he said on a time to his friends:  “What will Cassius do, think ye?  I like not his pale looks.”  Another time when Caesar’s friends warned him of Antonius and Dolabella, he answered them again, “I never reckon of them; but these pale-visaged and carrion lean people, I fear them most,” meaning Brutus and Cassius.

Shakespeare merely touches such a scene with the magic of his genius, and his Caesar speaks: 

    Let me have men about me that are fat: 
    Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights. 
    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look: 
    He thinks too much:  such men are dangerous.

A careful reading of North’s Plutarch and then of the famous Roman plays shows to how great an extent Shakespeare was dependent upon his obscure contemporary.

North’s translation, to which we owe so many heroic models in our literature, was probably made not from Plutarch but from Amyot’s excellent French translation.  Nevertheless he reproduces the spirit of the original, and notwithstanding our modern and more accurate translations, he remains the most inspiring interpreter of the great biographer whom Emerson calls “the historian of heroism.”