man interest.

Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a further feeling,
a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and
one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like
Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh are to be tolerably understood. One of
the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of
Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some
moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man,
anything more than a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose
pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit
to the Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are regarded by
superficial persons, who see only such outward circumstances of their
history as correspond with their own impressions. The high nature of
these men, and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise out
and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves back into their times
and teach our hearts to feel as they felt. We do not find in the
language of the voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
help at home, any of that weak watery talk of 'protection of
aborigines,' which, as soon as it is translated into fact, becomes the
most active policy for their destruction, soul and body. But the stories
of the dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians, which were
widely known in England, seem to have affected all classes of people,
not with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and down the pages of
Hakluyt, who, with a view to make them known, translated Peter Martyr's
letters; and each commonest sailor-boy who had heard these stories from
his childhood among the tales of his father's fireside, had longed to be
a man, that he might go out and become the avenger of a gallant and
suffering people. A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart,
seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is given; and it was
a point of honour, if of nothing more, among the English sailors, to do
no discredit by their conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so conspicuous in their
dealings with their European rivals, either failed to touch them in
their dealings with uncultivated idolators, or the high temper of the
aristocracy was unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
s