spends the pith of his
manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this
sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings,
"half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those
forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered,
suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island.
Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable. In the northern
latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_
gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And
Christ His Sonne."

The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy
of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada
times. And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same
energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within
the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are
laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by
Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.

In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not
only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in
ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of
justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later
times. If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it
implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial
systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs. Eliot, for instance, in the
work entitled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its
thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older
ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal. We
encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that
Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the
language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship.
In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines
the steadfastness of the action. And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct
from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and
Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or
imperfectly developed. The ideal of these English statesmen is framed
upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom,
equally sublime, and more catholic and humane. Whatever its immediate
influence upon certain of their contemporaries,