Nearly four centuries have rolled past since the great discoveries of Columbus and his followers led to the establishment of Spanish and Portuguese dominion over the vast continent of South America, and were succeeded somewhat later by the still more important settlement of the Anglo-Saxon race on the northern portion of the New World.[3] These events, marvellous in themselves and in their accessories, and momentous from the way in which they have affected the destinies of the human race, present a study singularly and enduringly interesting, differing so strongly as they do from the characteristics of ancient history. The latter are necessarily contemplated by the reader as types and symbols of the past, on which he has only the privilege of reflecting; whilst in the former case, in perusing the story of these comparatively modern discoveries of hitherto unknown continents, he feels himself almost a sharer in the adventures of those extraordinary men by whose deeds his own present destiny is so essentially influenced. He cannot desire to be a Lycurgus or a Phocion, a Cæsar or a Cato; but it is no tax on the imagination, no repulse to the feeling, to picture himself a Columbus in embryo, and his soul and being is wrapt up in the narrative of that great voyager. The English are proverbially a nautical people, nursed and cradled in the lap of that ocean with whose element their earliest sympathies are enlisted and identified. In these days it is a light matter indeed, with the facilities of progression abounding on all sides, and the great ministrant of celerity, steam, at our command in every form, to ramble from one extremity of the earth to the other; but the slightest retrospection suffices to demonstrate how very different a state of things prevailed at the close of the fifteenth century. The mere existence of a western continent was a phantasy of dream-land, when the mysteries of that mighty waste of waters which separated the then known world from all beyond, was shrouded in obscurity as unfathomable as its deepest depths; when only frail barks and mariners who dreaded to lose sight of the land could be found to attempt the seemingly-desperate fate of exploring an unknown sea in search of what at best existed but in the imagination of those who were regarded as visionaries, and whose presumptuous rashness the very winds themselves seemed to rebuke by blowing with unprecedented constancy in the one direction, as if to proclaim the impossibility of return.[4] Taking these circumstances into our consideration, a most thrilling interest is attached to this recital that will endure to the latest posterity; and school-boys for generations to come will ponder over the amazing achievements of these wondrous knights-errant of the main with the same eager curiosity as the grown men of to-day.