POETRY AND IMAGINATION 



parents. She was born in 1587 and christened along 

 with Manteo, one of the Indians who had visited 

 England with Captains Amadas and Barlow. That 

 same year she was abandoned, along with the other 

 colonists. In 1607, when the settlement was next 

 renewed, it was reported that there were still seven 

 of the English alive among the Indians, 'four men, 

 two boys, and one maid.' The strange girlhood of this 

 one maid, if she were Virginia Dare, may well have 

 set Shakespeare's fancy working. And the portrait of 

 Caliban, with his affectionate loyalty to the drunkard, Caliban. 

 his adoration of valour, his love of natural beauty and 

 feeling for music and poetry, his hatred and super- 

 stitious fear of his task-master, and the simple cunning 

 and savagery of his attempts at revenge and escape — 

 all this is a composition wrought from fragments of 

 travellers' tales, and shows a wonderfully accurate and 

 sympathetic understanding of uncivilised man. 



These travellers' tales gave a new import to the old "^^^ Golden 

 fables of Arcadia and the Golden Age. The poetic idea * 

 of the original simplicity and virtue of man seemed to 

 be confirmed by the warrant of sober fact, and steadily 

 gained in acceptance, until, in the Eighteenth Century, 

 it overturned the institutions and disturbed the peace 

 of Europe. Montaigne, in his essay Of Cannibals^ ex- 

 presses the view of a philosophic observer. ' I find,' he 

 says, speaking of the Indians, '.that there is nothing 

 barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I 

 can gather, excepting that everyone gives the title of 

 barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own 

 country. . . . They are savages at the same rate that 

 we say fruits are wild, which nature produces of herself 



XII 113 H 



