BAYNE: THE SETTLEMENT OF VIRGINIA 109 
port far and near. Her trade grew rapidly, and commercial enter- 
prise and adventure characterized the period. Improvements in 
the art of printing had greatly facilitated the spread of informa- 
tion, and news of successful voyages into foreign lands gave a 
zest for similar undertakings on a larger scale. ‘These involved 
more extensive schemes and heavier expenditures than individuals 
were able to undertake, and so joint stock companies were formed 
to which were granted various corporate privileges of an exclusive 
kind, including the right to trade with foreign people, to discover 
and settle new territories, and to govern or help to govern colonies 
so formed. Such were the Muscovy Company, the English East 
India Company, the Dutch East India Company, the “ Fellowship 
of English Merchants for Discovery of New Trades” and, later 
on, the London and Plymouth Companies, with which we are more 
b) 
especially concerned. 
It was this fine flow of enterprise and adventure that Elizabeth’s 
reign had encouraged, but that her successor contemplated with 
doubt if not with dismay. 
“No sovereign,’ says a historian of the times, “could have 
jarred against the conception of an English ruler which had grown 
up under Plantagenet or Tudor, more than James the First. His 
big head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs, 
stood out in as grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of 
Henry or Elizabeth, as his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of 
personal dignity, his buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his 
pedantry, his contemptible cowardice.” 
But far more objectionable to his English subjects than any 
crudeness of manner or grotesqueness of personal appearance was 
James’ extravagant estimate of his princely prerogative and his 
tyrannous opinion of his royal birthright. 
Time is not at my disposal to trace the many expeditions that 
had for their object the founding of English settlements in the 
New World. ‘The latter part of the sixteenth century was made 
honorable by the progressive spirit and patriotism of these under- 
takings, all doomed to failure, but all serving a useful purpose in 
