To them, indeed, we must look for the first beginnings of our modern English prose, and some of its noblest passages.

The writers, as often as not, were otherwise utterly unknown--ship's pursers, super-cargoes, and the like--men without much literary craft or training, whose style is great because of the greatness of their subject, because they had no literary artifices to stand between them and the plain and direct telling of a stirring tale.

But the ferment worked outside the actual doings of the voyagers themselves, and it can be traced beyond definite allusions to them.

Allusions, indeed, are surprisingly few; Drake is scarcely as much as mentioned among the greater writers of the age.

None the less there is not one of them that is not deeply touched by his spirit and that of the movement which he led.