itle of "Voyages to the Northwest,"
in hope of finding our old friends Davis and
Frobisher, and we found a vast unnecessary Editor's
Preface; and instead of the voyages themselves, which
with their picturesqueness and moral beauty shine
among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of
Hakluyt, an analysis and digest of their results,
which Milton was called in to justify in an inappropriate
quotation. It is much as if they had undertaken to
edit "Bacon's Essays," and had retailed
what they conceived to be the substance of them in
their own language; strangely failing to see that the
real value of the actions or the thought of remarkable
men does not lie in the material result which can be
gathered from them, but in the heart and soul of those
who do or utter them. Consider what Homer's
"Odyssey" would be, reduced into an analysis.

The editor of the "Letters of Columbus" apologizes
for the rudeness of their phraseology. Columbus, he
tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the
art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him.
We are put on our guard, and warned not to be
offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record
of sufferings under which his great soul was staggering
towards the end of its earthly calamities, where the
inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out
from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of
which the highest literary pathos is poor and meaningless.

And even in the subjects which they select they are
pursued by the same curious fatality. Why is Drake
to be best known, or to be only known, in his last
voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to
immortalize the failure? When Drake climbed the tree
in Panama, and saw both oceans, and vowed that he
would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head
over the southernmost angle of the world; when he
scored a furrow round the globe with his keel, and
received the homage of the barbarians of the antipodes
in the name of the Virgin Queen; he was another man
from what he had become after twenty years of court
life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting, and gold-hunting.
There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we take it as
the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his death,
which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what
he did.

But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive
than all these is the editor of Hawkins's "