they lived and what they talked, one understands Kit Marlowe and Robert Greene, and that wild company of scholars and poets; they would cram into whatever narrow span of life was granted them all--all--all--that life can give of learning and poetry, and feasting and love and joy. They were intoxicated with the ideas of their time. They were weighed down with the sheaves--the golden harvest of that wondrous reaping. Who would not live in such a time? The little world had become, almost suddenly, very large, inconceivably large. The boys of London, playing about the river stairs and the quays, listened to the talk of men who had sailed along those newly-discovered coasts of the new great world, and had seen strange monsters and wild people. In the taverns men--bearded, bronzed, scarred--grave men, with deep eyes and low voice, who had sailed to the Guinea coast, round the Cape to Hindostan, across the Spanish Main, over the ocean to Virginia, sat in the tavern and told to youths with flushed cheeks and panting, eager breath queer tales of danger and escape between their cups of sack. We were not yet advanced beyond believing in the Ethiopian with four eyes, the Arimaspi with one eye, the Hippopodes or Centaurs, the Monopoli, or men who have no head, but carry their faces in their breasts and their eyes in their shoulders. None of these monsters, it is true, had ever been caught and brought home; but many an honest fellow, if hard pressed by his hearers, would reluctantly confess to having seen them. On the other hand, negroes and red Indians were frequently brought home and exhibited. And there were crocodiles, alive or stuffed; crocodiles' skins, the skins of bears and lions, monkeys, parrots, flying-fish dried, and other curious things. And there were always the legends--that of the land of gold, the Eldorado; that of the kingdom of Prester John; that of St. Brandan's Island; and, but this was later, the theory--proved with mathematical certainty--of the great southern continent. Enough, and more than enough, to inflame the imagination of adventurers, to drive the lads aboard ship, to make them long for the sails to be spread and to be making their way anywhere--anywhere--in search of adventure, conquest, glory, and gold. [Illustration: BURGHLEY HOUSE]