The London to which Smith returned was the London of Shakespeare.  We should be thankful for one glimpse of him in this interesting town.  Did he frequent the theatre?  Did he perhaps see Shakespeare himself at the Globe?  Did he loaf in the coffee-houses, and spin the fine thread of his adventures to the idlers and gallants who resorted to them?  If he dropped in at any theatre of an afternoon he was quite likely to hear some allusion to Virginia, for the plays of the hour were full of chaff, not always of the choicest, about the attractions of the Virgin-land, whose gold was as plentiful as copper in England; where the prisoners were fettered in gold, and the dripping-pans were made of it; and where—­an unheard-of thing—­you might become an alderman without having been a scavenger.

Was Smith an indulger in that new medicine for all ills, tobacco?  Alas! we know nothing of his habits or his company.  He was a man of piety according to his lights, and it is probable that he may have had the then rising prejudice against theatres.  After his return from Virginia he and his exploits were the subject of many a stage play and spectacle, but whether his vanity was more flattered by this mark of notoriety than his piety was offended we do not know.  There is certainly no sort of evidence that he engaged in the common dissipation of the town, nor gave himself up to those pleasures which a man rescued from the hardships of captivity in Tartaria might be expected to seek.  Mr. Stith says that it was the testimony of his fellow soldiers and adventurers that “they never knew a soldier, before him, so free from those military vices of wine, tobacco, debts, dice, and oathes.”

But of one thing we may be certain:  he was seeking adventure according to his nature, and eager for any heroic employment; and it goes without saying that he entered into the great excitement of the day—­adventure in America.  Elizabeth was dead.  James had just come to the throne, and Raleigh, to whom Elizabeth had granted an extensive patent of Virginia, was in the Tower.  The attempts to make any permanent lodgment in the countries of Virginia had failed.  But at the date of Smith’s advent Captain Bartholomew Gosnold had returned from a voyage undertaken in 1602 under the patronage of the Earl of Southampton, and announced that he had discovered a direct passage westward to the new continent, all the former voyagers having gone by the way of the West Indies.  The effect of this announcement in London, accompanied as it was with Gosnold’s report of the fruitfulness of the coast of New England which he explored, was something like that made upon New York by the discovery of gold in California in 1849.  The route by the West Indies, with its incidents of disease and delay, was now replaced by the direct course opened by Gosnold, and the London Exchange, which has always been quick to scent any profit in trade, shared the excitement of the distinguished soldiers and sailors who were ready to embrace any chance of adventure that offered.