As for the men who created this romance, they belong to a time when
the world had renewed her youth, put the old things behind, and begun
afresh, with new lands to conquer, a new faith to hold, new learning,
new ideas, and new literature. Those who sit down to consider the
Elizabethan age presently fall to lamenting that they were born three
hundred years too late to share those glories. Their hearts,
especially if they are young, beat the faster only to think of Drake.
They long to climb that tree in the Cordilleras and to look down, as
Drake and Oxenham looked down, upon the old ocean in the East and the
new ocean in the West; they would like to go on pilgrimage to Nombre
de Dios--Brothers, what a Gest was that!--and to Cartagena, where
Drake took the great Spanish ship out of the very harbour, under the
very nose of the Spaniard, they would like to have been on board the
_Golden Hind_, when Drake captured that nobly laden vessel, _Our Lady
of the Conception_, and used her cargo of silver for ballasting his
own ship. Drake--the 'Dragon'--is the typical English hero; he is
Galahad in the Court of the Lady Gloriana; he is one of the long
series of noble knights and valiant soldiers, their lives enriched and
aglow with splendid achievements, who illumine the page of English
history, from King Alfred to Charles Gordon.
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