re in his creations. But we are
misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing
creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as
the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked
abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men
as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the
ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh
and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found
the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios,
his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we
can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more than the rhythmic
echo of the life which it depicts.

It was, therefore, with no little interest that we heard of the
formation of a society which was to employ itself, as we understood, in
republishing in accessible form some, if not all, of the invaluable
records compiled or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
else, have their appointed death-day; the souls of them, unless they be
found worthy of a second birth in a new body, perish with the paper in
which they lived; and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their own want
of merit, but from our neglect of them, were expiring of old age. The
five-volume quarto edition, published in 1811, so little people then
cared for the exploits of their ancestors, consisted but of 270 copies.
It was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries, or for the
great libraries, where it could be consulted as a book of reference; and
among a people, the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's name,
the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never so much as occurred to
them that general readers would care to have the book within their
reach.

And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose Epic of the modern
English nation. They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the
great men in whom the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of substantial facts,
which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to
the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people. We
have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to whom the heroism
like the dominion of the world had in time past been confined. But