ope and Christendom, because he was the leader of
a true Renaissance and Reformation, that he is so much more than a
figure in the story of Portugal.

[Illustration: COLUMBUS AS S. CHRISTOPHER, CARRYING THE CHRISTIAN FAITH,
IN THE FORM OF THE INFANT JESUS, ACROSS THE OCEAN.]

There are figures which are of national interest: there are others which
are less than that, figures of family or provincial importance; others
again which are always dear to us as human beings, as men who felt the
ordinary wants and passions and lived the ordinary life of men with a
brilliancy and an intense power that was all their own; there are other
men who stand out as those who have changed more or less, but changed
vitally and really, the course of the world's history; without whom the
whole of our modern society, our boasted civilisation, would have been
profoundly different.

For after all the modern Christian world of Europe has something to
boast of, though its writers spend much of their time in reviling and
decrying it. It is something that our Western world has conquered or
worsted every other civilisation upon earth; that with the single
exception of China, it has made everyone of the coveted tracts of Asia
its own; that it has discovered, settled, and developed a new continent
to be the equal of the old; that it has won not a complete but a good
working knowledge of the whole surface of the globe. We are at home in
the world now, we say, and if we would know what that means, we must
look at the Europe of the tenth or even the fourteenth century, look at
the theoretic maps of the Middle Ages, look at the legends and the
pseudo-science of a civilisation which was shut up within itself and
condemned for so long to fight in a narrowing circle against incessant
attacks from without and the barbarism which this state of things kept
alive within. Then perhaps we shall take things a little less for
granted, and perhaps also we shall begin to think that if this great
advance, the greatest thing in Modern History as we know it, that which
is the distinction and glory of the last three hundred years, is at all
due to the inspiration and the action of Henry of Portugal, an obscure
Prince of the fifteenth century, that obscure Prince may possibly belong
to the rank of the great civilisers, the men who have most altered
society and advanced it, men like Alexander and Caesar and the founders
of the great world religions.

It may be as well to