found ready to undertake an expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade; and let them go where they would, they were sure of Elizabeth’s countenance.  We find letters written by her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every potentate of whom she had ever heard, to the Emperors of China, Japan, and India, the Grand Duke of Russia, the Grand Turk, the Persian Sofee, and other unheardof Asiatic and African princes; whatever was to be done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted when she could, and admired when she could not.  The springs of great actions are always difficult to analyze—­ impossible to analyze perfectly—­possible to analyze only very proximately, and the force by which a man throws a good action out of himself is invisible and mystical, like that which brings out the blossom and the fruit upon the tree.  The motives which we find men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient to have prompted them to so large a daring.  They did what they did from the great unrest in them which made them do it, and what it was may be best measured by the results, by the present England and America.  Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the world, and in the position of England, to have furnished abundance of conscious motive, and to have stirred the drowsiest routinier statesman.

Among material occasions for exertion, the population began to outgrow the employment, and there was a necessity for plantations to serve as an outlet.  Men who, under happier circumstances, might have led decent lives, and done good service, were now driven by want to desperate courses—­“witness,” as Richard Hakluyt says, “twenty tall fellows hanged last Rochester assizes for small robberies;” and there is an admirable paper addressed to the Privy Council by Christopher Carlile, Walsingham’s son-in-law, pointing out the possible openings to be made in or through. such plantations for home produce and manufacture.

Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile ambitions, however, lay a noble enthusiasm which in these dull days we can hardly, without an effort, realize.  The life-and-death wrestle between the Reformation and the old religion had settled in the last quarter of the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle between England and Spain.  France was disabled.  All the help which Elizabeth could spare barely enabled the Netherlands to defend themselves.  Protestantism, if it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by the circumstances of the time the championship of the Reformed faith fell to the English sailors.  The sword of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting the gold ships on their passage; and, inspired by an enthusiasm like that which four centuries before had precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East, the same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our bays and rivers with pleasure yachts then fitted out armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic, and plunder and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could meet them.