of
Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters written by
her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
potentate of whom she had ever heard, to the Emperors
of China, Japan, and India, the Grand Duke of Russia,
the Grand Turk, the Persian Sofee, and other unheardof
Asiatic and African princes; whatever was to be
done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted
when she could, and admired when she could not. The
springs of great actions are always difficult to analyze--
impossible to analyze perfectly--possible to analyze
only very proximately, and the force by which a man
throws a good action out of himself is invisible and
mystical, like that which brings out the blossom and
the fruit upon the tree. The motives which we find
men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient
to have prompted them to so large a daring. They did
what they did from the great unrest in them which
made them do it, and what it was may be best measured
by the results, by the present England and America.
Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the
world, and in the position of England, to have furnished
abundance of conscious motive, and to have stirred the
drowsiest routinier statesman.

Among material occasions for exertion, the population
began to outgrow the employment, and there
was a necessity for plantations to serve as an outlet.
Men who, under happier circumstances, might have
led decent lives, and done good service, were now
driven by want to desperate courses--"witness," as
Richard Hakluyt says, "twenty tall fellows hanged last
Rochester assizes for small robberies;" and there is an
admirable paper addressed to the Privy Council by
Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing
out the possible openings to be made in or through.
such plantations for home produce and manufacture.

Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile
ambitions, however, lay a noble enthusiasm which
in these dull days we can hardly, without an effort,
realize. The life-and-death wrestle between the Reformation
and the old religion had settled in the last quarter
of the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle
between England and Spain. France was disabled.
All the help which Elizabeth could spare barely enabled
the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism,
if it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by
the circumstances of the time the championship of the
Reformed faith fell to the Englis