Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent sent to help the Dutch against Spain.  The story has often been told of his giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.”  Sidney was England’s darling, and there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain “the meed of some melodious tear.”  Spenser’s Ruins of Time were among the number of these funeral songs; but the best of them all was by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known.

Another typical Englishman of Elizabeth’s reign was Walter Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, practical enterprise that marked, the times.  He fought against the queen’s enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot army against the League in France.  Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great nursery of English seamen.  He was half-brother to the famous navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain, Sir Richard Grenville.  He sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 1591 he published a report of the fight, near the Azores, between Grenville’s ship, the Revenge, and fifteen great ships of Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon, “memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical fable.”  Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish Armada of 1588.  He was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of Essex “singed the Spanish king’s beard,” in the harbor of Cadiz.  The year before he had sailed to Guiana, in search of the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish town of San Jose, in the West Indies; and on his return he published his Discovery of the Empire of Guiana.  In 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in the Azores.  He took a prominent part in colonizing Virginia, and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe.

America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors, nightmares, and enchantments.  In 1580, when Francis Drake, “the Devonshire Skipper,” had dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, after his voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been mightily stirred.  These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, published by Richard Hakluyt in 1589, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation, worked powerfully on the imaginations of the poets.  We see the influence of this literature of travel in the Tempest, written undoubtedly after Shakspere had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers’s shipwreck on the Bermudas or “Isles of Devils.”