‘The means,’ he says, ‘to send such as shall labour effectually in this business is, by planting one or two colonies of our nation upon that firm [mainland] where they may remain in safety and first learn the language of the people near adjoining (the gift of tongues being now taken away) and by little and little acquaint themselves with their manners, and so with discretion and mildness distill into their purged minds the sweet and lively liquor of the gospel.’ His sagacity and good judgment is shown by the way in which he dealt with and arranged the enormous mass of material he accumulated. The wild and fantastic methods of some Elizabethan historians were not to his mind: he launched not out into a Universal History of the World on Ralegh’s plan, and by his very restraint and the value of his material produced a book which will live as long as the English language, while Ralegh’s ambitious effort has gone to dust, which weighs light in the balance compared with the jewelled lines of his lyric, ‘If all the world and love were young.’ Hakluyt shirks none of the pedestrian necessities of his task: he carefully records the name of the historian of each voyage, as well as the name of the voyager, so that every man may ‘answer for himself, justify his reports, and stand accountable for his own doings.’ Moreover, he exercises a stern supervision over the superfluous—a necessity if he was to get as many voyages and as much information as possible into the compass of his volumes, for as Professor Walter Raleigh says in his inspiring Introductory Essay to Maclehose’s edition of Hakluyt, ‘It was the habit of his age to begin even a nautical diary with a few remarks on the origin of the world, the history of man, and the opinions of Plato.’ Delightful though such remarks would now be to the student of Elizabethan literature, Hakluyt had little use for them. He had a stern, a great, and a practical intent in compiling his ‘Principal Navigations,’ and a far better thing to him than literary graces would be the knowledge that the profits of the East India Company were increased by £20,000 through the study of his book. He classified and arranged his voyages in three series: first the voyages to the South and South-East; then the North-Eastern voyages; and last the voyages to the West, ‘those rare, delightfull and profitable histories,’ and ‘the beginnings and proceeding of the two English Colonies planted in Virginia,’ of which Ralegh said, ‘I shall yet live to see it an English nation.’