Modern England was then in the throes of her birth. She had not
yet reached the vigour of her youth, though she was full of life
and energy. She was about to become the England of free thought,
commerce, and manufactures; to plough the ocean with her navies,
and to plant her colonies over the earth. Up to the accession of
Elizabeth, she had done little, but now she was about to do much.
It was a period of sudden emancipation of thought, and of immense
fertility and originality. The poets and prose writers of the
time united the freshness of youth with the vigour of manhood.
Among these were Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, the
Fletchers, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. Among the statesmen of
Elizabeth were Burleigh, Leicester, Walsingham, Howard, and Sir
Nicholas Bacon. But perhaps greatest of all were the sailors,
who, as Clarendon said, "were a nation by themselves;" and their
leaders--Drake, Frobisher, Cavendish, Hawkins, Howard, Raleigh,
Davis, and many more distinguished seamen.
They were the representative men of their time, the creation in a
great measure of the national spirit. They were the offspring of
long generations of seamen and lovers of the sea. They could not
have been great but for the nation which gave them birth, and
imbued them with their worth and spirit. The great sailors, for
instance, could not have originated in a nation of mere landsmen.
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