places the farmers have attempted to bind each other by agreements to refrain from indiscriminate slaughter. It is to be hoped that such efforts may be more widely made, and may be more systematic and successful. Nor is this improbable, for the Norwegian, like his Scottish cousin, is shrewd and provident; and when he knows what his interests are, he will not neglect them.

Our sons or grandsons may find Norway an angler's paradise a paradise, however, for entrance into which payment will be demanded. Nothing for nothing is becoming, must become, a principle recognized and acted on in the remotest parts of Norway. And why not? There is something ludicrous and irritating in the complaint of tourists who knew the country thirty years ago, "Ah, Norway isn't what it was." On cross-examination this is found to mean that the farmers and the boatmen have learned the elements of political economy. Yet they give honest and cheerful service for very moderate wages. Ah, faithful Knut! you were not mercenary. Never shall I forget your one English phrase, "Oh, yes; I tink so," which had so many meanings; which served as a good-humored answer to my sometimes unreasonable complaints of you, or sky, or sun, or winds; which came promptly and more intelligently in response to invitations to have some aqua vitae-invitations sparing and infrequent, for aqua vitae was your weakness. The stick you walked three miles in the rain to give me when our companionship ended, a stick curiously cut and twisted by your own hands, was an offering of the simplest kindness and good fellowship.

Nor shall I forget you, Eric, the handsome youth; who could never have enough of rowing, and were always loath to leave the loch without one more turn round the island where the big fish lie. May you make a fortune in the States, and return home to fish for your own amusement, when you are not supporting in the Storthing some drastic Fishery Bill.

All Norwegian boatmen are not Knuts or Erics; but they are never lazy

nor uncivil if their employer minds his

manners.

Others than anglers would do well to visit this beautiful country. They will find in it beauty of infinite variety. It is a smaller Switzerland; a larger Scotland, with the additional charm of its fiords. The writer would be the last to speak disrespectfully of the Scottish, or even of the English lakes: it is only truth that compels him to confess that in a day's drive on any part of the road between Sorum and Löken-and farther north than Löken the country grows in beauty-a traveller will see lake after lake, each with wood and crag and 'far-projecting precipice," which resemble but surpass Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond; which would infinitely surpass them were it not that in the long deep valleys one misses the heather and the open spaces, and the varied outline of hills like the Cobbler or Ben An. But the dark-green pine woods and the towering cliffs between which the lakes of this part of Valders lie have a sombre beauty of their own, worthy to be praised in another "Excursion or "Lady of the Lake" Carent vate sacro.

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Wordsworth, had he lived in Valders, would have felt a stronger inspiration than he derived from the tamer beauties of the English lakes, and his flight would have been higher and more sustained. Scott would have peopled Östre or Vestre Slidre with many a fair Ellen or bold Roderick Dhu-for Norwegian history has dark and thrilling episodes, and is full of the material he knew how to use. The weird story of "Sinclair's Expedition" would have found a place in the "Legend of Montrose." The Norwegian peasants still tell their children how 900 Scots, marching to the aid of the Lion of the North, were caught in the defile of Kringelen in Gudbransdal and "crushed like earthen pots" by 300 peasants; how the victors, after a carouse, having come to the conclusion that the prisoners who had survived the

*See Murray's "Handbook for Norway," Route 12, edition 1892.

fray would be expensive to keep (there is some vraisemblance here, for no Norwegian would undertake to keep a Scotsman), shot them one by one in a barn-where the bullet-marks can be seen to this day- because of their " acts of murder, pillage, and incendiarism." To the credit both of the good behavior and prowess of our countrymen historical criticism has shown that only 300 men sailed from Dundee to Norway; that they "neither burned, murdered, nor destroyed anything on their march through the country," and that they were defenceless, or nearly so, having failed to meet the Netherlands contingent which was to have supplied the

Scottish force with arms. What a story Captain Dalgetty would have made of it! Nevertheless we may be glad that Scott and Wordsworth wrote in a more widely spoken language, and for a greater people, than Norsk and Norskmann. And by greater I mean more numerous, for were there forty millions of Norwegians the empire of the sea would not be ours without dispute, and the hardy descendant of the Vikings would be a formidable rival. He is not, like his forefathers, a lawless raider; but he has inherited their seamanship and steadfastness and courage.-Blackwood's Magazine.

"CHERISH Marchandise, keep the Admiraltie." I lit on this line in "The Libell," little book, that is, "on England's policie," a rugged poem interpolated by Hakluyt into his famous. "Voyages" (1599). The advice was, and is, so obviously sound that none need insist on its soundness; and it hit my fancy on another score. It occurs in a poem which, else, is one lament over the decadence of England's seapower; and that lament is wedged into the classic story of England's earliest and greatest achievements by sea. But such intrusion of counsel, of regret, of foreboding, into a contemporary record of the golden age of expansion struck a note not unfamiliar. A like incongruity is still, to-day, the dominant feature of our national attitude toward national endeavor. A like lament sings wailing in our ears.

I should mock the mighty dead did I compare the last quarter of the nineteenth with the last quarter of the sixteenth century. There can be no comparison; but there is similarity-in miniature. Mr. Chamberlain has told us that "we live in interesting times; Mr. Goschen, that we have two hundred and fifty effective ships of war; and, from South Africa, from East and West

So I turn to Elizabethan literature and dip at hazard here and there, to strike the track of Elizabethan adventurers. They did great things, and their contemporaries wrote great books. Let us, then, dive into these Elizabethan books, and let us see to what extent and in what fashion they mirror the deeds. of the Elizabethan adventurers. them we can study the relation of literature to national expansion, and the aspects of that relation may prove suggestive, even encouraging. At any rate, the study of it may serve for an anodyne to suspense.

In

Taking up this relation, then, the first thing that strikes is the portentous volume of the adventure, and the portentous volume of the literature, which may fairly be called Elizabethan. The

second is the narrowness of the area within which the two overlap. The gigantic output of Elizabethan authors is not, as one might have supposed, mainly concerned with the prodigious deeds of Elizabethan adventurers. Indeed, in dramatic and lyrical poetry, which form the chief features of Elizabethan literature, it is only here and there that you discover a transient allusion to the national ferment which carried all kinds and conditions of men to the uttermost parts of the earth.

Yet when Shakespeare left the glades of Warwickshire he came, as I have said elsewhere, to a "London rocking and roaring with Armada enthusiasm." The names of poets and playwrights were, no doubt, on every tongue-Lyly and Lodge, Marlow and Spenser-but the air was ringing, too, with the names of adventurers of Raleigh, and Drake, and Grenville. An acute critic has argued that the literature of any epoch portrays, not the immediate needs and actions of an age, but its aspirations toward those experiences which are most remote from its own. Thus, in our own age, which, in the main, is one of peace and industry, we have the novel and the ballad of adventure. Men who spend their lives at desks, when they take a holiday into the region of romance, seek for relaxation in the terror of a shipwreck or the shambles of a battle-field. This theory is confirmed by a study of Elizabethan verse. It is all but grotesque to find such a man as Sir Walter Raleigh masquerading in poetry as a shepherd, and piping alternate ditties with Edmund Spenser on what they were pleased to call an "oaten reed." But it is not, on second thoughts, inexplicable. To the war-worn and seaweary, who had pierced the tangles of Brazil, threaded the icebergs of Labrador, and affronted the batteries of Cadiz, the arcadia of convention, with its "soft white wool Arcadian sheep do bear" and its flageolets tied up with ribbands, offered the most welcome, because the most complete, contrast. It was, of all men in the world, Sir Philip Sidney who wrote "Arcadia" and the most moving sequence of love sonnets,

next to Shakespeare's, which we have in English.

Having noted the huge volume of what I may call "Arcadian" verse, we may now note, outside that volume, and even within it, allusions here and there which can only be appreciated when they are referred to the enterprises that occupied so many Elizabethans. In the sonnets of Shakespeare, Daniel, Drayton, Constable, and others, there are frequent allusions to "maps." In Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," you read of "more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies." Now maps did not then " summon up remembrance" of dull hours in a schoolroom: they were associated in men's minds with the latest attempt at co-ordinating the latest theory of the world's configuration, born of the latest voyage beyond unknown seas; so that then maps thrilled with adventure and speculation and mystery. And, again, in Elizabethan poetry and, more particularly, in Shakespeare's plays, you have powerful descriptions of storms at Pericles, with his wife dying in childbirth on the weltering ship, addresses the cyclone:

sea.

taken from Elizabethan accounts of Magellan's first voyage round the world. I shall quote from "Purchas his Pilgrimes," published in 1625; but, in this instance, based on Eden's translation of "Pigafetta's Journal;" and Eden published in 1577, say ten years before Shakespeare came to town. Thus it runs in "Purchas:" "Here were they in great danger by Tempest: But as soone as the three Fires, called Saint Helen, Saint Nicholas, and Saint Clare, appeared upon the Cables of the Ships, suddenly the tempest and furie of the Windes ceased." I cannot doubt that Shakespeare drew on this account of Magellan's voyage for his "Tempest," for on the very next page in "Purchas we come upon Setebos, Caliban's god. You read that four Giants, so the story ran, that is to say four savages of lofty stature, were shackled by a stratagem, and that "when they saw how they were deceived, they roared like Bulls, and cryed upon their great Devill Setebos, to helpe them." I shall insist later on a closer connection between Elizabethan prose and Elizabethan adventure; but, reverting now to poetry, you find in Shakespeare several allusions to Indians and the Indies. "O Ameri

ca, the Indies," for example, in "The Comedy of Errors," an early play; and, again, in "The Tempest," "They will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar when they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." A similar reference to an Indian, as the feature of a show, will be found in "Henry VIII."

In that play, one of the latest by Shakespeare-most of it, indeed, and the passage which I shall quote, being by Fletcher-you have a wider declaration, not of the instruments and accidents, the "maps" and "tempests" of discovery, but of the spirit working in men's minds which drove them to expand the Empire. It was written some years after James I. came to the throne, but, since the last act shows the christening of Elizabeth, a prophecy of the only safe kind, namely, one written after the event, is placed in the mouth of Cranmer:

"When Heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness

peace plenty, love, truth, terror That were the servants to this chosen infant,

Shall then be his (James's) and like a vine grow to him:

Wherever the bright sun of Heaven shall shine,

The honor and the greatness of his name Shall be, and make new nations: he shall flourish,

And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches

To all the plains about him: our children's children

Shall see this and bless heaven."

It cannot be said that James did much to promote colonization; indeed, he hampered the Virginian settlers at every turn: but it is true that the seed of new nations was then sown, farscattered by the spirit of expansion.

The passage may be paralleled from Shakespeare's contemporary, Daniel: "Who in time knows whither we may vent The treasures of our tongue? To what strange shores

This gain of our best glory shall be sent T'enrich unknowing nations with our stores?

What worlds, in th' yet unformed Occident,

May 'come refined with th' accents that are ours?"

In an earlier poet, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's master, you find the same theme of expansion put into the mouth of Tamburlaine the Great." Dying, he calls out:

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"Give me a map; then let me see how much Is left for me to conquer all the world That these, my boys, may finish all my wants."

And the stage direction follows (one brings him a map). This insistence on "maps," the Spanish touch in the word "Hurricano," the frequent confusion of America with India, all to be noted in these allusions to adventure scattered

through Elizabethan verse, are signs of the time and indices to current opinion. There is such another in one of Shakespeare's sonnets, the 116th, which we admire for its mingled splendor and obscurity. He writes of love:

"O no! It is an ever-fixéd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."

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sea

Here, "mark" clearly means a mark," or beacon, but the reference to the star, presumably the North Star, has proved a stumbling block to critics. Yet some light is shed upon it by recalling that the English versions of Spanish discoveries, by Eden, Hakluyt, and Lock, were new books when Shakespeare wrote. For in those versions the disappearance of the North Star, when you sail far enough South, and the variation of the compass from it, when you sail far enough West, constituted themes for wonder and mysterious awe. Even in Purchas' account of Columbus' first voyage, published so late as 1625, you read: "On the fourteenth day of September he first observed the variation of the Compas, which no man till then had considered, which every day appeared more evident." These shiftings of the Pole Star which, until then, had been the one thing stable in a world of change, gave rise to the wildest speculations. Elsewhere, you find the most frantic attempts to account for such apparent changes by assumptions that the world bore the shape not of an apple, but of a pear, or that the earth was in parts piled up in protuberances of gigantic elevation. America was to them, truly, a new world, as new as the planet Mars would be to us; and the spirit in which it was regarded in relation to the Pole Star may be gauged from a passage in Peter Martyr, written, no doubt, in, 1516, but only Englished by Eden during Shakespeare's lifetime: "We ought therefore certainely to think ourselves most bound unto God, that in these our times it hath pleased him to reveale and discover this secrete in the finding of this new worlde, whereby wee are certaynely assured, that under our Pole Starre"-mark that "our"-" and under the Equinoctiall line, are most goodly and ample regions."

"Anthropophagi and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders," is the recent origin, the novelty, the consequent mystery, of the enterprises on which Elizabethan Adventurers embarked. And these impressions were of course heightened by the fact that the English, with few exceptions, were the latest in this field of adventure, and that the accounts of earlier discoveries had but recently been translated out of Spanish and Latin into the English tongue. To understand this, we must trace the sequence of nautical discovery. The first praise must be given to the Portuguese, who were first, because they first "trusted the compass,' the touched Needle," which Purchas writes, "is the soule of the Compasse, by which every skilfull Mariner is emboldened to compasse the whole body of the Uni

verse.

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Let the Italians," he goes on, "have their praise for Invention: the praise of Application thereof to these remote Discoveries is due to the Portugals, who first began to open the Windowes of the World, to let it see it selfe." Again, "the Loadstone," he writes, was the Lead-Stone, the very seed and ingendring stone of Discoverie."

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Now nobody wanted to discover America. They wanted to reach India by sea, to reach Cathay, or China, and Cipango; a fabulous island of fabulous wealth, whose image seems to have been formed, partly from Plato's legend of the island Atlantis; partly, perhaps, from rumors of Japan brought over land, from mouth to mouth, by Oriental traders, who had never been further than China, and, since the adventure of Marco Polo, never so far. Mr. Fiske's admirable book, "The Discovery of America," and the old maps which he reproduces in it, show that Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci both died without a suspicion that they had discovered America. They, and others after them for years, practically omitted the extent of the Pacific from their conception of the Globe, even as they contracted the extent of Asia eastwards. Where they did, as matter of fact, find America, they expected to find China, and, in

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