ilgrims and the Puritans. While
the Scottish gentlemen were still taking service in foreign
courts--as, for example, the Admirable Crichton with the Duke of
Mantua--the young Englishman was sailing with Cavendish or Drake; he
was fighting and meeting death under desperadoes, such as Oxenham; he
was even, later on, serving with L'Olonnois, Kidd, or Henry Morgan.
All the history of North America before the War of Independence is
English history. Scotland and Ireland hardly came into it until the
eighteenth century; till then their only share in American history was
the deportation of rebels to the plantations. The country was
discovered by England, colonized by England; it was always regarded by
England as specially her own child; the sole attempt made by Scotland
at colonization was a failure; and to this day it is England that the
descendants of the older American families regard as the cradle of
their name and race.

As for the men who created this romance, they belong to a time when
the world had renewed her youth, put the old things behind, and begun
afresh, with new lands to conquer, a new faith to hold, new learning,
new ideas, and new literature. Those who sit down to consider the
Elizabethan age presently fall to lamenting that they were born three
hundred years too late to share those glories. Their hearts,
especially if they are young, beat the faster only to think of Drake.
They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as
Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the
new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre
de Dios--Brothers, what a Gest was that!--and to Cartagena, where
Drake took the great Spanish ship out of the very harbour, under the
very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the
_Golden Hind_, when Drake captured that nobly laden vessel, _Our Lady
of the Conception_, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his
own ship. Drake--the 'Dragon'--is the typical English hero; he is
Galahad in the Court of the Lady Gloriana; he is one of the long
series of noble knights and valiant soldiers, their lives enriched and
aglow with splendid achievements, who illumine the page of English
history, from King Alfred to Charles Gordon.

The first and greatest of the Elizabethan knights is Drake; but there
were others of nearly equal note. What of Raleigh, who actually
founded the United States by sending the first colonist