versal
passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the West were
described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civilization of Mexico
and Peru disclosed by Cortes and Pizarro, the voyages of the Portuguese
threw open the older splendours of the East, and the story of India and
China was told for the first time to Christendom by Maffei and Mendoza.
England took her full part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson, an
English traveller, made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back
Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetrated
among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the
globe. The "Collection of Voyages" which was published by Hakluyt in
1582 disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number of
the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their
religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and
wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which it
gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which
from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's conception of
Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigne, marks the beginning of a new
and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human nature and
human history. The fascination exercised by the study of human character
showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the wonderful
popularity of the drama.

[Sidenote: The new English temper.]

And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic power was added in
England, at the moment which we have reached in its story, the impulse
which sprang from national triumph, from the victory over the Armada,
the deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic terror
which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the new people. With its
new sense of security, its new sense of national energy and national
power, the whole aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest
of Elizabeth's reign had been political and material; the stage had been
crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils and Walsinghams and
Drakes. Literature had hardly found a place in the glories of the time.
But from the moment when the Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol the
figures of warriors and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of
poets and philosophers. Amidst the throng in Elizabeth's antechamber the
noblest form is that of the singer who lays the "Faerie Queen