by commerce, by planting, mining, fishing, and by the quick eye and the strong hand.  Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war, felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary.  There were those in the streets who would see Raleigh go to the block on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, who would fight against King Charles on the fields of Newbury or Naseby, Kineton or Marston Moor, and perchance see the exit of Charles himself from another scaffold erected over against the Banqueting House.

Although London at the accession of James I.(1603) had only about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants—­the population of England then numbering about five million—­it was so full of life and activity that Frederick, Duke of Wurtemberg, who saw it a few years before, in 1592, was impressed with it as a large, excellent, and mighty city of business, crowded with people buying and selling merchandise, and trading in almost every corner of the world, a very populous city, so that one can scarcely pass along the streets on account of the throng; the inhabitants, he says, are magnificently appareled, extremely proud and overbearing, who scoff and laugh at foreigners, and no one dare oppose them lest the street boys and apprentices collect together in immense crowds and strike to right and left unmercifully without regard to persons.

There prevailed an insatiable curiosity for seeing strange sights and hearing strange adventures, with an eager desire for visiting foreign countries, which Shakespeare and all the play-writers satirize.  Conversation turned upon the wonderful discoveries of travelers, whose voyages to the New World occupied much of the public attention.  The exaggeration which from love of importance inflated the narratives, the poets also take note of.  There was also a universal taste for hazard in money as well as in travel, for putting it out on risks at exorbitant interest, and the habit of gaming reached prodigious excess.  The passion for sudden wealth was fired by the success of the sea-rovers, news of which inflamed the imagination.  Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who was in London in 1585, records that, “news arrived of a Spanish ship captured by Drake, in which it was said there were two millions of uncoined gold and silver in ingots, fifty thousand crowns in coined reals, seven thousand hides, four chests of pearls, each containing two bushels, and some sacks of cochineal—­the whole valued at twenty-five barrels of gold; it was said to be one year and a half’s tribute from Peru.”