RICHARD HAKLUYT 



unendinsf. His life is a notable example of how single- T'he moral of 

 ness or purpose and dogged persistence, in a man not 

 endowed, so far as we can tell, with any of the more 

 brilliant attributes of genius, lead him, as if inevitably, to 

 high achievement and lasting fame. 



His main purpose he has himself declared. He '^^^ 

 belongs to that stalwart race of clerics who, next to England. ' 

 the Kingdom of Heaven, love a fight ; but .fighting is 

 the accident of his book, not the essential. The dis- 

 covery of the world and the expansion of England are 

 what make his heart beat faster; he is a zealot of the 

 map and of the flag. He knows that he lives in an age 

 of great attempts; the reproach of sluggishness and lack 

 of enterprise, which was fastened on England during the 

 earlier years of discovery, is now clean wiped away, and 

 the English are at home on every sea. ^ In this most 

 famous and peerless government of her most excellent 

 Majesty, her subjects, through the special assistance and 

 blessing of God, in searching the most opposite corners 

 and quarters of the world, and, to speak plainly, in com- 

 passing the vast globe of the earth more than once, have 

 excelled all the nations and people of the earth.' They 

 started without those advantages of science and ancient 

 learning which befriended the Portuguese; the parts of 

 the world that were left for them to discover were more 

 difficult and dangerous than ' the mild, lightsome, 

 temperate, and warm Atlantic Ocean, over which the 

 Spaniards and Portugals have made so many pleasant, 

 prosperous and golden voyages.' Yet they redeemed 

 their delay, and are become the teachers and pilots of 

 others. The Dutch, says Hakluyt, deserve commenda- P^pl^of 

 tion for their Northern voyages, * yet with this proviso ; 



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