POETRY AND IMAGINATION 



without paying heavy penalties. Only by keeping firm 

 hold of that guarantee of sincerity which is supplied 

 by the deed done can it steer clear of the slippery 

 pitfall of rhetoric. But action is not dependent on 

 poetry ; and the inarticulate generations who inherited 

 and carried on the work celebrated in the Book of 

 Voyages played for higher stakes than praise. It was 

 almost an accident that the book was made ; the dynasty 

 of Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher would have es- 

 tablished its reign had it never found a chronicler. In 



1776 proposals were issued for a reprint of Hakluyt, Reprints of 

 1 1 , . J , 1 r 11 1 1 Hakluyt's 



but support was lacking, and the scheme tell through. ^^^^^ 



A single later reprint, numbering three hundred and 

 twenty five copies, satisfied the demand of near three 

 hundred years. It is the high reward of great deeds 

 that they can aflFbrd to be forgotten. Fame is a luxury, 

 if not a vanity. By secret and unconscious methods of 

 initiation, by that unwritten tradition which descends 

 from father to son, by the law of nature which gives 

 currency to inherent value no matter whose the super- 

 scription, the ideas and aims of the great Elizabethan 

 seamen have become the creed of the British Empire. 

 Yet Hakluyt's book, though it has little to do with 

 the history of letters, gives, to those who care to read, 

 a rare opportunity of insight into the hidden processes 

 of the making of a nation. When it was first published ^ J'^^ordof 

 all that had been imagined and attempted, at the 

 cost of so many years of effort and so many men's 

 lives, was yet to do. No thoroughfare had been dis- 

 covered by the North East or the North West. No 

 English community had been established oversea. No 

 gold-mine was in the possession of England. The 



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