These various clerical duties were apparently not exacting. At all events they did not interrupt the steady prosecution of his work of historical research and publication, nor abate a jot of his ardour for the advancement of American colonization. In his latter years he gathered around him a group of young men whom he inspired further to pursue or continue the work to which he had practically devoted his life. At his suggestion and through his friendly encouragement translations by various hands of standard works on Africa, China, and other little known parts, were then brought out. His own final publications were dated from Westminster. He died presumably in his apartment at Westminster, on the twenty-third day of November, 1616, seven months after Shakspere. His burial place was in St. Peter’s Church, Westminster Abbey, but no inscription marks his grave. He left a fair estate, comprising “the manor house of Bridge Place” and several houses in Westminster. This estate passed to his only son, Edmund Hakluyt, a Trinity College man, who, we are told, had not the prudence to keep it, but dispersed it through usurers’ and sheriffs’ hands. Like Raleigh, Hakluyt never came to America, although more than once planning to make the voyage. With the permanent colonization of Virginia at last achieved, he was offered the living of Jamestown; but in place of himself he supplied it with a curate. Equally with Raleigh he shares, and is awarded, the title of virtual founder of the English colonies in North America. III “THE PRINCIPAL NAVIGATIONS” In Hakluyt’s monumental work of _The Principal Navigations_ we have the whole brave story of English adventure through the centuries from the dim old days of the Saxon kings—when the known world was a little thing, only a spot on the map of to-day—to the Tudors’ times, with the discoveries of the New World, advancement into remote quarters of the Old World, the expansion of commerce, and the planting of colonies in America. It is truly, as aptly termed by James Anthony Froude, the prose epic of the modern English nation. The first issue of 1589, the single volume in three parts, comprehended the main features of this story; the three-volumed second edition, 1598–1600, amplified it with a wealth of added incident and richness of color. The three parts of the portly volume of 1589, covering eight hundred and twenty-five foolscap pages, comprised successively the narratives of English voyages that had been performed to the South and Southeastern regions of the Old World; the North and Northeastern travels; and the Western, or New World, navigations. The contents were elaborately detailed in the full title-page. [Illustration: FAC-SIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF THE THIRD, OR AMERICAN, VOLUME OF HAKLUYT’S "VOYAGES," EDITION OF 1598–1600. From a copy of the original edition in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). ]