to have occurred to them in the course of the work; but their evil destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get themselves executed.  We opened one volume with eagerness, bearing the title of “Voyages to the Northwest,” in hope of finding our old friends Davis and Frobisher, and we found a vast unnecessary Editor’s Preface; and instead of the voyages themselves, which with their picturesqueness and moral beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of Hakluyt, an analysis and digest of their results, which Milton was called in to justify in an inappropriate quotation.  It is much as if they had undertaken to edit “Bacon’s Essays,” and had retailed what they conceived to be the substance of them in their own language; strangely failing to see that the real value of the actions or the thought of remarkable men does not lie in the material result which can be gathered from them, but in the heart and soul of those who do or utter them.  Consider what Homer’s “Odyssey” would be, reduced into an analysis.

The editor of the “Letters of Columbus” apologizes for the rudeness of their phraseology.  Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the art of navigation.  We are to make excuses for him.  We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which his great soul was staggering towards the end of its earthly calamities, where the inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which the highest literary pathos is poor and meaningless.

And even in the subjects which they select they are pursued by the same curious fatality.  Why is Drake to be best known, or to be only known, in his last voyage?  Why pass over the success, and endeavour to immortalize the failure?  When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans, and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen; he was another man from what he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting, and gold-hunting.  There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we take it as the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his death, which we desire—­not what he failed to do, but what he did.

But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is the editor of Hawkins’s “Voyage to the South Sea.”  The book is striking in itself; it is not one of the best, but it is very good; and as it is republished complete, if we read it through, carefully shutting off Captain Bethune’s notes with one hand, we shall then find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone of all the writings of the period.