re was least resistance; and that Huns and
Vandals, instead of fighting their way to the south of Europe, would
have gone, by thousands and by myriads, under their several chiefs, to
take possession of regions smiling with pleasure, and waving with
fertility, from which the naked inhabitants were unable to repel them.

Every expedition would, in those days of laxity, have produced a
distinct and independent state. The Scandinavian heroes might have
divided the country among them, and have spread the feudal subdivision
of regality from Hudson's bay to the Pacifick ocean.

But Columbus came five or six hundred years too late for the candidates
of sovereignty. When he formed his project of discovery, the
fluctuations of military turbulence had subsided, and Europe began to
regain a settled form, by established government and regular
subordination. No man could any longer erect himself into a chieftain,
and lead out his fellow-subjects, by his own authority, to plunder or to
war. He that committed any act of hostility, by land or sea, without the
commission of some acknowledged sovereign, was considered, by all
mankind, as a robber or pirate, names which were now of little credit,
and of which, therefore, no man was ambitious.

Columbus, in a remoter time, would have found his way to some
discontented lord, or some younger brother of a petty sovereign, who
would have taken fire at his proposal, and have quickly kindled, with
equal heat, a troop of followers: they would have built ships, or have
seized them, and have wandered with him, at all adventures, as far as
they could keep hope in their company. But the age being now past of
vagrant excursion and fortuitous hostility, he was under the necessity
of travelling from court to court, scorned and repulsed as a wild
projector, an idle promiser of kingdoms in the clouds; nor has any part
of the world yet had reason to rejoice that he found, at last, reception
and employment.

In the same year, in a year hitherto disastrous to mankind, by the
Portuguese was discovered the passage of the Indies, and by the
Spaniards the coast of America. The nations of Europe were fired with
boundless expectations, and the discoverers, pursuing their enterprise,
made conquests in both hemispheres of wide extent. But the adventurers
were not contented with plunder: though they took gold and silver to
themselves, they seized islands and kingdoms in the name of their
sovereigns. When a new reg