the island, they should carve the name of the place to which they removed on some conspicuous object, with a cross above the name if they went away in distress. The name CROATAN was found cut in a post, but without the cross: thus the people seemed not to have abandoned the island in distress. But what had occasioned this strange exodus of the Roanoke men, women, and children to Croatan an Indian town on the coast? The whole affair remained a mystery and remains as great a mystery to-day. Repeated efforts were made to ascertain from the Indians what had become of the colonists; but they could not or would not say what had happened. Had the poor people wandered away into the cypress forests and been lost? Had they starved on the route to Croatan? Had the Indians put them to death? The secret is still a secret, and this sudden disappearance of more than a hundred human beings is one of the strangest events of history.

So the Roanoke colony ended. It was the first tragic chapter in the history of the United States, and resembles rather the sombre fancy of some dramatist of the time than an actual occurrence. All connected with it is moving, and the sharply contrasted figures cling to the memory the bearded mariners, and women and children wandering away into the woods; the pale-faced Governor searching for his daughter, when he returns to the lonely island; and, passing across the background, the stalwart forms of Drake and Grenville, the one famous for hunting down the great Armada in the English Channel, and the other for his desperate fight on board the Revenge. His fate and the fate of his colony were not unlike. Both struggled long and bravely, but the struggle came to an end in dire catastrophe.

"All hopes of Virginia thus abandoned," wrote one of the old chroniclers, "it lay dead and obscured from 1590 till this year 1602." It lay dead and obscured longer. Nothing further was effected in the sixteenth century, and the Americas seemed fated to remain Spanish possessions to the end of time. The struggle was apparently over, and the wildest fancy could scarcely have conceived what we see to-day- this huge empire dwindled to a few weak dependencies, and confronting them the great Protestant Republic of the United States occupying the continent from ocean to ocean.

The wedge which split this hard trunk was the landing in May, 1607, of about one hundred Englishmen at Jamestown.

II.

THE TIMES.

THE Virginia "plantation," as the old writers called it, began at a remarkable period. The year 1600 may be taken as the dividing line between two eras the point of departure of a new generation on the untried journey into the future.

Europe had just passed through the great convulsion of the Reformation, and this with the invention of printing had suddenly changed the face of the world. It is difficult to speak of this change without apparent exaggeration. The dissemination of the Bible in the vulgar tongue was followed by astonishing results.

The un

learned could search the Scriptures for their rule of conduct without the intervention of a priesthood, and an upheaval of the human mind followed. A mysterious voice had awakened the sleepers, and they had started

up, shaking off the old fetters. The lethargy of ages had disappeared. Thought, so long paralyzed by dogma, roved in every direction, moving nimbly and joyfully where it had groped and stumbled before in the thick darkness. The nations of Europe were like blind men who have suddenly been made to see. Daring aspirations took possession of them, and the new ideas of the new age crowded into every mind, hurrying and jostling each other. In our old and prosaic world it is difficult to realize the youth and enthusiasm of that time. Authority had lost its prestige, and serfdom to prejudices social or religious had disappeared. The priest muttering his prayers in Latin was no longer the keeper of men's consciences; and the prerogative of the King and the privilege of the noble began to be regarded as superstitions. That hitherto unknown quantity, the People, all at once revealed its existence, and those who for centuries had allowed others to think for them began to think for themselves.

All this had come with the new century which summed up and inherited the results of that which had preceded it. Beginning at Wittenberg with the protest of Luther, the Reformation had swept through the Continent and extended to England and Scotland, where its fury was greatest and lasted longest. It raged there during the reigns of Henry VIII., Mary, and Elizabeth, and only died down at her death, when the long work was at last accomplished, and Protestantism was firmly established.

The free thought of the time in England, as everywhere, had resulted from reaction and the immense influence of printed books. But books were not all. Bacon, the author of the inductive philosophy, had

published his " Advancement of Learning," and Spenser, the perfect flower of the Renaissance, his "Faëry Queen; but volumes of abstruse thought and refined poesy were for the few. The people at large were compelled to look elsewhere, and to educate their minds by other appliances than costly folios which were beyond their reach. The acted drama precisely supplied this popular want, and became the educator of the people. The time had come for Shakespeare and his brother dramatists; and suddenly the epoch flowered in the great names which have made the age of Elizabeth so illustrious. A race of giants appeared, whose works were the expression of the times. All the characteristics of the generation were summed up in these dramas - the unreined fancy, the wild imagination, the revolt against the conventional, the daring thought which questioned all things and would sound the mysteries of this world and the world beyond. At the head of this great group stood Shakespeare. On the stage of the Globe and Blackfriars theatres this master dramatist of the age, and of all the ages, directly addressed the ardent crowds who flocked at his summons. Packed together in the dingy pit, under the smoking flambeaux, the rude audiences saw pass before them in long panorama the whole history of England with its bloody wars, the fierce scenes of the Roman forum, the loves of Romeo and Antony, hump-backed Richard, the laughing Falstaff, and the woeful figures of Lear and Hamlet. What came from the heart of Shakespeare went to the human hearts listening to him. The crowd laughed with his comedy and cried with his tragedy. He was the great public teacher, as well as the joy of his age an age full of impulse, of hot aspiration and vague desire, which recognized its own portrait in his dramas.

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Thus books, the acted drama, the thirst for knowledge, the ardent desire of the human mind to expand in all directions, made the last years of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth a new era in the history of the human race. Men longed for new experiences, to travel and discover new countries, to find some outlet for the boiling spirit of enterprise which had rushed into and overflowed the time. The adventurous sea voyages of the period were the direct outcome of this craving; suddenly a passion for maritime exploration had developed itself. We have the record of what followed in the folios of Hakluyt and Purchas "Divers Voyages touching the Discovery of America," Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation,"” “Purchas, his Pilgrimage," and other works of the same character. Magellan circumnavigated the world, and Sir Francis Drake doubled Cape Horn, coasted northward to the present Alaska, attempted the northwest passage, and finding it impracticable, crossed the Pacific, traversed the Indian Ocean, and returned to England by the Cape of Good Hope. The English flag was thus carried into every sea, and wherever the flag of Spain was encountered, it was saluted with cannon. For a whole generation these adventurous voyages and hard combats went on without ceasing, and on the continent of Europe another outlet was presented to the fierce ardor of the times. Flanders was an incessant battle-ground; and in Transylvania the Christians were making war on the Turks. English soldiers of fortune flocked to the Christian standard, and fought among the foremost, winning fortune and renown, or "leaving their bodies in testimony of their minds."

At the end of the century this long period of fierce