, as
it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the Divine mission, the
spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth,
the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was
beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas
fighting, discovering, colonising, and graved out the channels, paving
them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise
of England has flowed out over all the world. We can conceive nothing,
not the songs of Homer himself, which would be read among us with more
enthusiastic interest than these plain massive tales; and a people's
edition of them in these days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugene
Sue circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the most blessed
antidote which could be bestowed upon us. The heroes themselves were the
men of the people--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes; and
no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh, lent its polish or
its varnish to set them off. In most cases the captain himself, or his
clerk or servant, or some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
chronicled the voyage which he had shared; and thus inorganically arose
a collection of writings which, with all their simplicity, are for
nothing more striking than for the high moral beauty, warmed with
natural feeling, which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck. If he is
distinguished in his profession, he is professional merely; or if he is
more than that, he owes it not to his work as a sailor, but to
independent domestic culture. With them, their profession was the school
of their nature, a high moral education which most brought out what was
most nobly human in them; and the wonders of earth, and air, and sea,
and sky, were a real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
God speaking to them.

That such hopes of what might be accomplished by the Hakluyt Society
should in some measure be disappointed, is only what might naturally be
anticipated of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
expensive editions to the publisher; and historical societies, from a
necessity which appears to encumber all corporate English action,
rarely fail to do their work expensively and infelicitously. Ye