English exploration in the age of Elizabeth is one of the main lines of national progress. It is no longer a by-path of our history, it is more and more plainly connected with that essential development of English life on which our Empire depended and depends. For it was in the latter half of the sixteenth century that the New World in East and West, by sea and land, was fully revealed to our countrymen, as it had been disclosed to Italians, Frenchmen, and Spaniards in the earlier years of the same century; the excitement, the hopes and fears, the boundless expectations, the astonishing achievements which had gone to inspire the heroic age of the countrymen of Columbus and Cortes, of Da Gama and Magellan—were all realised over again by the islanders of the Protestant North. Under Elizabeth our forefathers entered into the fulness of the national renaissance—for which they had been slowly educated since the Tudor dynasty began.