foreign courts—­as, for example, the Admirable Crichton with the Duke of Mantua—­the young Englishman was sailing with Cavendish or Drake; he was fighting and meeting death under desperadoes, such as Oxenham; he was even, later on, serving with L’Olonnois, Kidd, or Henry Morgan.  All the history of North America before the War of Independence is English history.  Scotland and Ireland hardly came into it until the eighteenth century; till then their only share in American history was the deportation of rebels to the plantations.  The country was discovered by England, colonized by England; it was always regarded by England as specially her own child; the sole attempt made by Scotland at colonization was a failure; and to this day it is England that the descendants of the older American families regard as the cradle of their name and race.

As for the men who created this romance, they belong to a time when the world had renewed her youth, put the old things behind, and begun afresh, with new lands to conquer, a new faith to hold, new learning, new ideas, and new literature.  Those who sit down to consider the Elizabethan age presently fall to lamenting that they were born three hundred years too late to share those glories.  Their hearts, especially if they are young, beat the faster only to think of Drake.  They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre de Dios—­Brothers, what a Gest was that!—­and to Cartagena, where Drake took the great Spanish ship out of the very harbour, under the very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the Golden Hind, when Drake captured that nobly laden vessel, Our Lady of the Conception, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his own ship.  Drake—­the ’Dragon’—­is the typical English hero; he is Galahad in the Court of the Lady Gloriana; he is one of the long series of noble knights and valiant soldiers, their lives enriched and aglow with splendid achievements, who illumine the page of English history, from King Alfred to Charles Gordon.

The first and greatest of the Elizabethan knights is Drake; but there were others of nearly equal note.  What of Raleigh, who actually founded the United States by sending the first colonists to Virginia—­the country where the grapes grew wild?  What of Martin Frobisher and Humphrey Gilbert?  What of Cavendish?  What of Captain Amidas?  What of Davis and half a score more?  The exploits and victories and discoveries—­in many cases, the disasters and death—­of these sea-dogs filled the country from end to end with pride, and every young, generous heart with envy.  They, too, would sail Westward Ho! to fight the Spaniard—­three score of Englishmen against thousand Dons—­and sail home again, heavy laden with the silver ingots of Peru, taken at Palengue or Nombre de Dios.