Corbet t: The Successors of Drake 555 national object," and that "the glory of 1588 tinged every succeeding year of the war : the sense of danger and the tension that had held the na- tional mind for a whole generation was gone, and a new generation grew up to revel in victory and discovery." Mr. Corbett's researches on the other hand have led him to see in the same period "the birth of the Spanish navy," such "well-matured attempts as the campaigns of 1596 and 1597," a "new Armada off Ushant," Spinola at Sluys, and " Span- ish naval stations established from end to end of the Channel," the in- vasion of Ireland and the " English cruising squadrons again and again driven off their ground by superior force." And even in the case of the expedition to Cadiz, the only naval event of Elizabeth's last decade ever dealt with in detail, Mr. Corbett disputes the dictum of "our first au- thority in naval history" that it was the Trafalgar of the Elizabethan war. To be sure, he says, it was the last naval victory, but "so far from being a crowning success it was rather an irretrievable miscarriage, that condemned the war to an inefficient conclusion." So much for Mr. Corbett's general interpretation of the period. Historical investigation is, however, not his only object : he deliberately uses the events he relates to illustrate and inculcate great principles of the art of war. The general strategical lesson of the period which Mr. Cor- bett wishes to emphasize seems to be the " limitation of maritime power." Few men of the time saw that " there is a point beyond which hostilities by naval action alone cannot advance. It was an army that was wanting. ' ' And the "real object of Essex and the military reformers," though os- tensibly a reorganization of the land forces with a view to coast defence, was, Mr. Corbett thinks, to form a corps for service beyond the seas, "a force that could reap where the fleet had sown." So it is that the book deals largely with military as well as naval operations, for how closely interdependent are the sister services in a great war "nothing," says Mr. Corbett, "shows more emphatically than the last years of the Elizabethan war." "Indeed," he adds, " it is not too much to say that the campaign in which Mountjoy and Carew saved Ire- land affords the first example in modern history of a naval force being rightly used by a military commander as a fourth arm." The book has further, as was to be expected, great biographical interest. With the delightful magic of the historian's art the author has conjured from the dusty lurking-places of libraries and archives a cluster of great Elizabethan figures and made them glow upon his pages in living colors. There is the romantic, tragic, "almost inconceivable" Essex, who for a time was "to fill the place of Drake as the embodiment of the war spirit in England, a man v • 1, had he been born like Drake into a station where all was to win by slow and persistent effort, might have hardened into one of the greatest figures of his time." Upon him indeed Mr. Corbett thinks, as Essex himself loved to dream, Drake's mantle fell rather than upon any other. The chief biographical interest of the book, however, centres perhaps about the enigmatic and scarcely less tragic figure of Raleigh, whom Mr. Corbett reluctantly feels compelled to deny a " high
