the discovery of America. Hitherto only the three Discovery of America, continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa had been known; but now the two great Americas were added to the map of the world. At first, of course, only small parts were touched at and discovered; but whatever was seen and gradually approached must have struck the imagination very forcibly. In America everything seems immense; the mountains, the rivers, the lakes are all on a vast scale compared with any of those in Europe. As travellers saw more and more of these they must have been amazed. Then there were the wonderful vegetation: the infinite forests, the giant trees, the climbing plants, the flowers; the strange animals, lovely humming-birds, and uncouth alligators; and, again, the curious redhued men some half savage, some civilized after a fashion of their own, with their religion, their temples, their arts, and history, and legends. In this region too there were great stores of gold, which has always had a fascination for the eyes of man. The alchemists, with all their toil, had never succeeded in making one of those pure shining grains; but here it was in abundance. All this was very exciting and animating. It was really a new world opening. Never, in all our lives, can we know what it was to find oneself living on the brink of such a wonderland as America seemed for the first hundred years or more after its discovery.

22. It would have been a great pride and pleasure to have been able to say that England had the glory of discovering, or even helping to discover, this new world beyond the sea. It was almost by chance that she did not, as Christopher Columbus, who could not find any one to help him with money or ships, though he applied to Genoa, Portugal, and Spain, one after the other, at last sent his brother Bartholomew to England, to see if its king would help him. Henry VII., notwithstanding his love of money, was a very sagacious, sensible man, and was thought very highly of throughout Europe.

23. Unfortunately, the brother of Columbus in travelling to England fell among thieves, or pirates, who stripped him so far literally of his raiment, that when he at last got to London he was in such miserable plight as not to have even a decent coat in which he could venture to appear at court. Before doing anything else he was obliged to try and earn money; and this he did by drawing and selling maps. (This in itself shows a kind of intellectual activity among the people; had they not taken some

rest in geography they would not have wanted Bartholo

mew's maps.) At last he contrived to get access to the king, laid before him all his brother's schemes and ideas, and met with a favourable reception. Henry was quite sensible enough to see, what so few others could, how likely Columbus was to prove right.

24. Columbus, it should be remembered, did not expect to discover a new world at all, but only to get round that way to India, and this was how the islands at which he first arrived received the name of the "West Indies." People had long been convinced that the world was not, as the ancients had thought, flat like a plate, but round like a globe; and even two or three hundred years before this had had ideas that it might be possible to sail all round it, though no one had ever dared try to do so. They were, however, learning to take long voyages now. Some time before this the mariner's compass had been invented, by the help of which sailors might venture to cross the sea, instead of only keeping near the land, as the Greeks and Romans used to do.

25. Henry was favourably inclined to the scheme of Columbus, and though he hesitated before making up his mind, it is quite possible that, but for Bartholomew's long delay, he would have been the one to fit out the expedition, and send the discoverer on his way. But meanwhile Columbus himself, not hearing any news from his brother, had gained the favour of Queen Isabella of Castile, and it was she who had the honour of helping him to America.

1498.

26. Thus the discovery of the New World cannot be called part of the history of England; but a few years afterwards Henry did send out an expedition to the new continent, headed by Sebastian Cabot, a Venetian, who had settled in England. He discovered many other parts of North America, and the island of Newfoundland; the very parts which are now filled with Englishmen. This we may call the first beginning of England's great colonial empire. Hitherto England had had no colonies, and so far had prospered well enough without them. The population was very small then compared to what it is now, and the land could maintain its people. Perhaps in all England there were about as many people as now live in London alone. But let us consider, as the population grew and multiplied, what would have become of us all, pent up between four seas, crowding and ever crowding, unless we could send forth our children to other lands beyond those seas. Now we have our thriving colonies in America, Africa, Australia, New

Zealand; great healthy children, far bigger than their mother; and, as was noticed before, our language is spoken more widely and universally than any other in the world. And of all this the seeds were sown in Henry VII.'s reign.

27. It was not very long after this that people began to understand more about the real system of the universe. We have seen what men believed in the middle ages about the earth, the sun, and the stars. The earth was fixed in the centre of all things, and the sun, and stars, and planets revolved around it, each in its own sphere. But now an astronomer Copernicus. named Copernicus, a native of Prussia, began to understand that this was not so; that the earth was not fixed and immovable, and the centre of the universe, but a planet like Mars, and Venus, and the others, and that they all revolved around the sun, just as we now know to be true. This was another great discovery, and was the beginning of modern astronomy.

Revival of learning.

28. In some other things men really made great progress by going back. One of these was learning, the other was religion. We know that, long ages ago, and before Christ came, when the Germans, and French, and English were still wild savages, there had been a wonderfully great and civilized nation living in Greece. Up to this hour we still feel that the Greeks in many ways were far higher than ourselves. They had great poets, whose works we love to read, and the greatest of modern Englishmen still try to translate them. Two very eminent statesmen have both made translations of Homer quite lately; besides some of our fine poets of former days, Chapman, Pope, and Cowper. Others of the Greek poets wrote grand plays, both tragedies and comedies.

29. Again, they had philosophers, who still seem to us wiser than any one but Christ, and the prophets, and apostles. They had historians who wrote the most delightful and interesting histories. They had artists who could carve and sculpture marble more wonderfully than any one can do now, and from whom all modern artists learn lessons of beauty and grace. And they had architects who built magnificent temples, such as most modern architects have tried to imitate.

30. Besides all this, the New Testament, as we know, was in Greek. But for many centuries nobody had been able to read all those wonderful books-the poetry, or the history, or the philosophy. Nobody knew Greek; only learned men knew Latin; and the Latin had become very bad and absurd. Medieval

Latin is most unlike real good Latin. The clergy looked on Greek as a wicked and heathenish language; all they knew of the Bible was from a very imperfect translation into Latin called the Vulgate; all they knew of the philosophers, of Plato and Aristotle, was from some translations made by the Arabs into Arabic, and out of Arabic translated again into Latin, with notes added which often quite altered the sense.

31. But just now a great disaster befell Europe which (as so frequently happens) brought some good after it. This was the taking of Constantinople by the Turks. For after all the Crusades which had been fought to drive the Mahometans even out of Palestine, the end had been that they had come steadily forward, had passed from Asia into Europe, taken possession of Turkey and Hungary, and established their capital at Constantinople, the city of Constantine, the first Christian emperor. The good that came out of this evil was, that numbers of learned Greeks, being driven from their homes, came into Italy, and especially to Florence, where the people were already very fond of literature and art, and taught them Greek.

1453.

32. Now the Italians began to read all those wonderful books which had been hidden away so long, and to take intense pleasure and delight in them. They began too to leave off the miserable medieval Latin of the monks, and to read the best books which the Romans had written in old days. And we may imagine how busy the new printing-presses were, which seemed to have been invented just at the right moment to help the busy, happy scholars. The great Latin poet Virgil was printed in 1470, and the Greek Homer in 1488.

This was called the Renaissance, or New Birth of learning. Some of the wisest and best of the scholars of England, hearing of its fame, travelled to Italy to get their share; to learn Latin and Greek, and to bring them back to England.

1

LECTURE XL. THE STATE OF RELIGION.

Worldliness of the Church. The monasteries. The Oxford reformers. The New Testament. Henry VIII. and Dean Colet.

1. AMONG all the changes of this period, the most important for England was that which soon took place in religion. We have not heard much about that lately, because all seemed State of religion. going on as before. There were still some Lollards, who, as we know, were a sort of Protestants, and every now and then some were cruelly put to death, and some were persuaded to deny their faith and recant; but they were quite obscure, and not much noticed except to be put down. The Roman Church, meanwhile, had been going on from bad to

worse.

2. All observing and sensible men knew that the clergy, instead of being more honest and honourable than the rest of the world, were much less so. A very excellent clergyThe clergy. man, Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, of whom we shall hear more by and bye, gave a large sum of money to found a school, and, of course, wanted what we now call "trustees" to take care of it. But he would not appoint any clergyman, bishop, dean, or canon to this office; nor would he appoint any nobleman, but selected some married citizens of honest report. When he was asked his reason for this, he said that he found "less corruption in these men." This, at any rate, leads us to hope that the middle class of traders and citizens, which was so increasing in wealth and importance, was an upright and conscientious class, worthy of the name of Englishmen.

1492.

3. The Pope at this time was Alexander VI., whose family name was Borgia;" he was perhaps the most wicked Pope that ever existed, which is saying a good deal. The Italians and everybody else were utterly horrified at his An Italian historian, writing of him after his death (by poison which he had intended for some one else), calls him "the extinct serpent, who by his immoderate ambition, pestifer

crimes.