by him Davis was presented to Burleigh, “who was also pleased to show him great encouragement.”  If either these statesmen or Elizabeth had been twenty years younger, his name would have filled a larger space in history than a small corner of the map of the world; but if he was employed at all in the last years of the century, no vales sacer has been found to celebrate his work, and no clue is left to guide us.  He disappears; a cloud falls over him.  He is known to have commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas, and to have returned five times from India.  But the details are all lost, and accident has only parted the clouds for a moment to show us the mournful setting with which he, too, went down upon the sea.

In taking out Sir Edward Michellthorne to India, in 1604, he fell in with a crew of Japanese, whose ship had been burnt, drifting at sea, without provisions, in a leaky junk.  He supposed them to be pirates, but he did not choose to leave them to so wretched a death, and took them on board, and in a few hours, watching their opportunity, they murdered him.

As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no difference; it was the chance of the sea, and the ill reward of a humane action—­a melancholy end for such a man—­like the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor brawl or ambuscade.  But so it was with all these men.  They were cut off in the flower of their days, and few indeed of them laid their bones in the sepulchres of their fathers.  They knew the service which they had chosen, and they did not ask the wages for which they had not laboured.  Life with them was no summer holyday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what their Master sent was welcome.  Beautiful is old age—­beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer.  In the old man, nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with her blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children’s children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings.  God forbid we should not call it beautiful.  It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful.  There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and—­strange that it should be so—­this is the highest life of man.  Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this.  They to whom it has been given to do the really highest work in this earth—­ whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings, slaves—­one and all, their fate has been the same—­the same bitter cup has been given to them to drink; and so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth century.  Their life