As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance for the genius of his nation, for the times of Vasco da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so this spirit of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet has but the memory of battles gained and lost wars, finds triumphant expression in Marlowe and his elder contemporaries. Marlowe's[8] great dialect seems to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes of Hakluyt's _Voyages_, that work which still impresses the imagination like the fragments of some rude but mighty epic, and in their company the exaggeration, the emphasis of _Tamburlaine_ are hardly perceptible. In Martin Frobisher, for instance, how the purpose which determines his career illumines for us the England of the first years of Elizabeth! Frobisher in early manhood torments his heart with the resentful reflection, "What a blockish thing it has been on the part of England to permit the Genovese Columbus to discover America!" That task was clearly England's! "And now there being nothing great left to be done," the sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is the discovery of the northwest passage to Cathay. Upon this he spends the pith of his manhood year by year, and the result of all the labours of this sea-Hercules, well! it is perhaps to be sought in those dim beings, "half-man, half-fish," whom he brings back from some voyage, those forlorn Esquimaux who, seen in London streets, and long remembered, suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Caliban and his island. Frobisher's watchword on the high seas is memorable. In the northern latitudes, under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the _Michael_ gives the challenge "For God the Lord," and sentinel replies, "And Christ His Sonne." The repulse of Spain is but the culminating achievement of this energy of the soul which greatens the life of England already in pre-Armada times. And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain this same energy attests its presence in a form assuredly not less divine within the souls of those who rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are laid eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared by Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton.