erit, but from our neglect of them, were
expiring of old age. The five-volume quarto edition,
published in 1811, so little people then cared for the
exploits of their ancestors, was but of 270 copies;
it was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries,
or for the great libraries, where it could be
consulted as a book of reference; and among a people,
the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's
name, the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never
so much as occurred to them that general readers would
ever come to care to have it within their reach.

And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose
Epic of the modern English nation. They contain the
heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom
the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of
substantial facts, which rival them in interest and
grandeur. What the old epics were to the royally or
nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people.
We have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to
whom the heroism, like the dominion, of the world had
in time past been confined. But, as it was in the days
of the apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the divine
mission, the spiritual authority over mankind, so, in
the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the
banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but
what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out
across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonizing,
and grayed out the channels, and at last paved them
with their bones, through which the commerce and
enterprise of England has flowed out over all the
world. We can conceive nothing, not the songs of
Homer himself, which would be read, among us at
least, with more enthusiastic interest than these plain
massive tales; and a people's edition of them in these
days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugene Sue
circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the
most blessed antidote which could be bestowed upon
us. The heroes themselves were the men of the people
--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes;
and no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh,
lent its polish or its varnish to set them off. In most
cases the captain himself, or his clerk or servant, or
some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
chronicled the voyage which he had shar