THE ENGLISH VOYAGES 



prose he would have esteemed the profits of the East 

 India Company, which occupied some part of his later 

 thoughts, and which, according to Sir Thomas Smith, 

 were increased by twenty thousand pounds through 

 a careful study of the * Books of Voyages.' 



III. 



The Foyages Here, then, in this Book of Voyages, set down in 

 TfEl bth niatter-of-fact fashion, one after another, with no striv- 

 ing after beauty of form, and no care for dramatic 

 effect, are the records of the deeds that made England 

 great. Over against the plays of Shakespeare and his 

 fellows, as their natural counterpart, must be set the 

 Voyages of Hakluyt ; he who would understand the 

 Elizabethan age, and what it meant for England, must 

 know them both. * The word,' says Chaucer, * should 

 be cousin to the deed.' In a wider sense than he in- 

 tended, the word always is cousin to the deed ; and 

 the lives that men live express themselves inevitably in 

 the books that they write. That marvellous summer 

 time of the imagination, the Elizabethan age, with all 

 its wealth of flowers and fruit, was the gift to England 

 of the sun that bronzed the faces of the voyagers and 

 of the winds that carried them to the four quarters of 

 the world. Historians of literature have been prone to 

 treat the imaginative growth of the Elizabethan age as 

 if it were a problem of skilful gardening, an instance 

 of high success in the mysteries of transplanting, graft- 

 ing, forcing, and the like. But what nourished the 

 pale slips brought from abroad } They struck their 



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