Dr. Johnson, in his ‘Life of Drake,’ states, with perfect complacency and without a word of qualification, that the bold sailor determined on an expedition, “by which the Spaniards should feel how imprudently they always act who injure and insult a brave man.” In his national zeal, the moralist seems to have forgotten that the retaliation of which he speaks was a lawless robbery, exercised upon the peaceable subjects of a king with whom we were not at war, in satisfaction of a wrong in which they the sufferers had neither part nor interest, and that this forcible levying of satisfaction, without national warrant and commission, is what in modern language we call piracy. It is fortunate for the peace of the world that this system of “sea divinity” is gone by. But in judging of this undertaking, which the courage, constancy, and success of its contriver could not by themselves save from the stigma of piracy, we must take into account the peculiar circumstances of the times. War, it is true, was not declared between Spain and England; but the bigotry of Philip II., his deep-rooted hatred and persecution of the Protestant religion, and his known support of the Catholic malcontents, caused Spain to be regarded by the English Protestants as their deadliest enemy; so that the plunder of Spanish America might be regarded, in the language of the Puritans, merely as a spoiling of the Egyptians; and the more because it was pretty clear, however the Queen’s prudence might delay it, that a breach must ensue between the two nations ere long. This feeling was strengthened by the jealous care with which the Spaniards sought to exclude all foreigners from navigating the new-discovered seas; and there is some justice in Elizabeth’s reply to the Spanish ambassador, when he complained of Drake’s piracies, that his countrymen, by arrogating a right to the whole new world, and excluding thence all other European nations who should sail thither, even with a view of exercising the most lawful commerce, naturally tempted others to make a violent irruption into those regions.