at is the testimony of the past to Britain's
title-deeds of empire.

Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old
myth, the _gigantes_, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the
wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat.
England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long
humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with
Scotland, greater than before her defeat. This energy of the soul,
quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada
struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada
England.

The spirit of the sea-wolves of early times, of the sailors who in the
fourteenth century fought at Sluys, and made the Levant an English
lake, lives again in the Tudor mariners. But it has been transformed,
and sets towards other and greater endeavours, planning a mightier
enterprise. These adventurers make it plain that on the high seas is
the path of England's peace; that the old policy of the Plantagenet
kings, with all its heroism and indisputable greatness, had been a
false policy; that England's empire was not to be sought on the plains
of France; that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have found the
way to the empire which the Plantagenets blindly groped after.

As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his
nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so
this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the
memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in
Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems
to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_,
that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of
some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the
emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher,
for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for
us the England of the first years of Elizabeth! Frobisher in early
manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a
blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the
Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly
England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the
sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the
northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he