tried for a north-west or north-east passage, and though they did not find it, their voyages had great results. And after the English went the Dutch. Hakluyt found it in his heart to commend the Dutch adventurers, but, said he, our English nation led the dance, broke the ice before them, and gave them good leave to light their candle at our torch.

From the time of the Odyssey the untravelled world had been shrinking. But until the Crusades it shrank very slowly. Homer's world after all was not so much smaller than Chaucer's. The Homeric map is in extent much the same as the Hereford map. But after Columbus all the doors were opened, and Europe surveyed mankind from China to Peru. Who can forget the superb cry of exultation with which Hakluyt introduces his great work? Which of the Kings of this land before 'Her Majesty had their banners ever seen in the Caspian 'Sea? Which of them hath ever dealt with the Emperor ' of Persia as Her Majesty hath done, and attained for her merchants large and loving privileges? Who ever saw 'before this regiment an English Ligier in the stately porch ' of the Grand Signior at Constantinople?' And so on through the commercial and diplomatic triumphs of the Virgin Queenin Tripoli and Aleppo, at Babylon, Balsara and Goa, on the mighty river of Plate,' and the coasts of Chili and Peru, and beyond new Spain and across the mighty breadth of 'the South Seas' to the once fabulous Cathay.

New horizons were opened, new oceans crossed, new continents revealed, ancient civilizations unburied. We speak lightly now of the discovery of the New World. The New World has become a conventional phrase. Just pause to think of the thrill of it when the New World was in fact as in a phrase a new world. Try to realize what a revelation it meant, what a revolution in the old world's whole mental conception of the scheme of things. The living writer who bears the splendid name of Sir Walter Raleigh says of it:

'All preconceived notions and beliefs concerning cosmography, history, politics, and society were made ridiculous by the new discoveries. The world had been opened up by the fanatical self-confidence of visionaries, and had proved to be wilder than their wildest dreams. New kingdoms were to be had for the taking. All things became possible. Credulity was wiser than experience; and the wonders reported were reckoned merely the first-fruits of greater things to come.'

It was as if an aeroplane blundered into Mars and came back to tell the tale. The inspiration of unlimited horizons is felt in all the literature of that age. The discovery of the New World meant Utopias in the sphere of thought as much as El Dorados in the sphere of trade, adventure, and empire. It inspired Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, as well as Frobisher and Drake. It gave England its great Elizabethan Age. Hakluyt's Voyages are the English Odyssey. Anthony Froude reproved and helped to remove our neglect of these Homeric heroes of ours. That neglect is past. We can buy Hakluyt now in shilling volumes; and to-day there is no English soul so dead as to be deaf to Drake's drum. We say now as Elizabeth's Lord High Admiral said then: 'God 'send us to see such a Company together again, when need is.' It was a map that first set Hakluyt's imagination afire. When he was a schoolboy at Westminster he happened, as he afterwards told Sir Francis Walsingham, to visit his cousin and found lying open on his board certain books of cosmography with a Universal Map.

'He seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof began to instruct my ignorance: he pointed with his wand to all the known seas, gulfs, bays, straits, capes, rivers, empires, kingdoms, dukedoms, and territories. From the map he brought me to the Bible, and turning to the 107th psalm, directed me to the 23rd and 24th verses, where I read that they that go down to the sea in ships, and do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. Which words of the prophet together with my cousin's discourse (things of high and rare delight to my young nature), took in me so deep an impression that I constantly resolved I would by God's assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature, the doors whereof were so happily opened before me.'

From Columbus' day to our own the untravelled world has been shrinking like Balzac's 'Peau de Chagrin' from the lust of exploration. Happily, even for us on whom the ends of the world are come, the thrill and exhilaration still live in the books. But, unless in the air, there remain no new worlds to conquer. Not even the Poles preserve their mystery. If Tennyson's Ulysses were alive to-day, the disillusion of his old age would have lacked its final consolation. Happily, however, the end of exploration is not the end of travel. After all its constellations of islands had been marked on the

map of the Pacific, there was still much for the Earl and the Doctor to learn, for Herman Melville, for Robert Louis Stevenson, to learn and to tell us. And it is consoling to reflect how near to their own boundaries the nations have found a playground for their fancy. Only a hundred years ago Scotland was for England the land of romance. For our great grandparents there was the excitement of revelation as well as the charm of fiction in the Waverley Novels. In the days of Rob Roy, Aberfoyle was for the average Englishman as remote as Abyssinia.

So for the French romantics less than a century ago, Spain was the land of romance. The ideal castle that the Englishman builds in the air the Frenchman finds in Spain. Over the Pyrenees the Frenchman thought himself in fairyland: and, indeed, the Pyrenees make a very fitting frontier for fairyland. So for the great medieval Kaisers, there was a fatal glamour in sunny Italy beyond the Alps. In classical times Thessaly was the land of witchcraft and diablerie. Nobody will forget this who has ever read the Golden Ass,' either in the difficult Latin of Apuleius or the pleasant Tudor English of Adlington. The moment you are over the Thessalian border you are head over ears among phantasms and illusions. Lucius the hero, a visitor from neighbouring Attica, even before he was transformed into the Ass, could not help seeing in every bird and beast, nay, in every stock and stone, a human being metamorphosed by magic art and malice. Even to-day there are, as Mr. Kipling says, dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the railway and the telegraph on the one side and on the other the days of Harun-al-Raschid.

The beauty of travel is that every true traveller is a pioneer. One may go pioneering in familiar scenes and find primitive conditions in the twentieth century. One has only to travel with Mr. Stephen Graham's Russian pilgrims to realize how little pilgrimages are a thing of the past, how much their spirit remains the same. To read Mr. Doughty's great book of Travels in Arabia Deserta' is to go a-pioneering in primitive pastoral conditions and to rediscover the life and atmosphere of the Book of Genesis. From familiarity with the old nomad life the author seems to have caught the very accent of the Pentateuch.

Discoveries are of many kinds. Did not Messrs. Spencer and Gillen only the other day discover the Stone Age still surviving in Central Australia? Have we not seen lately the resurrection of pre-Homeric Crete? Did not Layard rediscover Nineveh, and Schliemann Troy? How many of us dreamed of an ancient civilization in Mashonaland before Theodore Bent wrote his book about its Buried Cities'? What did Englishmen know of the monasteries of the Levant until Robert Curzon made them the theme of his entrancing narrative? Or what adventure was more adventurous than Vambéry's to Bokhara, or Burton's to Mecca, disguised as dervish and pilgrim; or what primitive mystery more mysterious than those they risked their lives to unveil ?

Man, says Horace, does not change his spirit by changing his sky. True: but his spirit may win in travel refreshment and fresh inspiration. Moreover, genius adds a transfiguring light to skies familiar and unfamiliar. Laurence Sterne travelled to see if they really ordered things better in France; and he took on his travels the genius of the essayist. His Sentimental Journey,' itself immortal, became the parent of an immortal progeny. Heine wrote his 'Sentimental Journeys,' and the 'Reisebilder' are the most magical things of their kind. Not among his 'pictures of travel,' but in a book of literary criticism, Heine asks suddenly:

'Do you know China, the land of winged dragons and porcelain tea-chests? The whole country is a cabinet of curiosities, surrounded by an interminable wall guarded by ten thousand Tartar sentinels. It is a country in which nature and mankind cannot look at each other without laughing, but they are too highly civilized and too polite to laugh out loud; and to contain themselves they make the oddest grimaces. It is a country without shadows and without perspective, and the brightly coloured houses have for roofs tiers upon tiers of umbrellas with tinkling bells which turn into a joke the very wind as it blows over them.'

I confess that as a reader I enjoy travel more with Heine even than with Humboldt; more with Stevenson and his donkey in the Cevennes even than across the great Gobi Desert with Sven Hedin. For in this kind the delight of travel is intensified by the vision of the poet and the humanity of the essayist. And you get the intimacy of the essayist without the egotism, and little romances, like the novelist's,

without the novelist's heavy-handedness. It is this spirit in travel which makes Eothen' the perennial joy it is. It was in this wise that Théophile Gautier painted Spanish life across the mountains,' or Eugène Fromentin a Sahara as yet unhackneyed by the circulating libraries. You would expect the French to excel in this kind as they do to-day with Loti and Maurice Barrès. It was this spirit that refreshed us when we escaped with Gissing from Grub Street to renew our humanity by the Ionian Sea. It is this spirit which makes Mr. E. V. Lucas so companionable a traveller. It was in this spirit that Mr. Belloc took on him his pilgrim vows. He vowed to go to Rome on pilgrimage and see all Europe which the Christian faith had saved; and he said: 'I will start from the place where I served in arms for my 'sins: I will walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep rough and cover thirty miles a day; and 'I will hear mass every morning; and I will be present at High 'Mass in St. Peter's on the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul.' Mr. Belloc did in fact enter Rome on foot, and was present at High Mass in St. Peter's on the appointed feast day; but all the other conditions had been broken in one part or another. To this rash vow of Mr. Belloc we owe a book for all its flings and poses as fresh as it is fascinating. Most entertaining of all, perhaps, was the spirit in which George Borrow wandered about Catholic Spain distributing his Protestant bibles. It is no wonder that the blameless meetings of the Bible Society were unusually well attended when a report was expected from its amazing missionary. Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us how the sombre Sunday reading of his Nonconformist childhood was lightened by the dear, deluding title of 'The Bible in Spain.' Borrow found in Spain a store of peculiar characters and picturesque scenes; but, to do his genius justice, it needed no such exotic aids. Mumpers Dell with a gipsy girl and a travelling tinker were good enough for him, or a horse-coper in his own county, or a Methodist in the mountains of Wild Wales. Borrow was born brother of the gipsy. The wind on the nearest heath was for him emancipation, inspiration, revelation. The road to fairyland ran from his front door. Happy are they of this brotherhood. Thoreau, said Bret Harte, found the freedom of the wilderness within earshot of Emerson's dinner-bell.