OF ALL COUNTRIES. 45 



evidently considered himself bound to produce still paler 

 shades of those pale shadows, the Eclogues of Virgil, just 

 as their author, the most precedent-loving of poets, rarely- 

 ventured to introduce an image or an incident without the 

 authority of some Greek original. 



All the strong energy and love of maritime dominion 

 animating the British nation of that period is well brought 

 out in Sir John Burroughes' work on the British Sove- 

 reignty of the seas. Caesar, he says, found the islanders 

 independent and absolutely repulsive of strangers, a pheno- 

 menon not even now wholly unfamiliar to our clubs and 

 drawing-rooms. He quotes, too, the grandiloquent decree 

 attributed to Edgar, wherein that monarch claims "by 

 the wide-flowing clemency of the high-thundering God 

 (altitonantis Dei largifljLente clement id) '^' to be the Basileus 

 of the English, and of all matters and islands of the 

 ocean, and of all the nations which are contained within it. 

 But, as the more sober Evelyn observes, the fact that the 

 savages of Britain drove strangers from their coasts by no 

 means argues any sovereignty over the waters ; nor does 

 Edgar's decree, even if w^e grant its authenticity, assert 

 anything more than a dominion over the islands and the 

 dwellers within them. Very strong arguments against the 

 absurd assumption of an universal jurisdiction possessed 

 by England over the waters of every ocean are brought 

 forward by the latter author, though he is not ashamed 

 to own that he lends it his public support. The licences 

 imposed by the Scottish Parliament upon the fishermen 

 of England are sufficient in themselves to destroy the 

 notion, while the protest of the Danes at Breda against 

 the proposed acquisition by the Scotch of the right of 

 fishing at Orkney, on the occasion of the marriage of 

 James the First and Sixth with the daughter of the 

 King of Denmark, is another irrefutable proof that the 



