of Arundel, who had planted some parts of it before the civil wars at home interrupted his operations. The Bahama Islands are also believed to have been begun to be planted about this time. In 1632 a part of what had till now been considered as the territory of Virginia was granted by Charles to be held in free and common soccage by Lord Baltimore, his majesty at the same time giving it the name of Maryland, in honour of the queen. Lord Baltimore was a Roman Catholic; and Maryland, which began to be colonized within two years from the date of the charter, afterwards formed the main refuge of the persons of that religion who were driven by the severity of the penal laws from England, greatly to the perturbation and rage of their puritan neighbours in Virginia, who made several attempts to drive the idolaters from a soil which, besides its having been thus desecrated, they regarded as rightfully belonging to their own colony. And in 1641, after the failure of a similar attempt made some years before, an English colony was settled, at the expense of Lord Willoughby, in Surinam, on the southern continent of America,—the Guiana the dream of whose gold mines lured on Raleigh to his fatal expedition.
The course of the growth and extension of the foreign commerce of the country during this interval is marked by few incidents requiring to be specially recorded, but the general results show that the progress made must have been considerable. An account of the height to which the trade of England had arrived in 1638 is given by Lewes Roberts in his work entitled " The Merchant's Map of Commerce," published at London in that year; and a summary of what is most material in his statements, with a few additional notices from other sources, will be sufficient for our present purpose. Roberts, a native of the principality, is almost as eloquent in some passages as his countryman Fluellin; but even his flourishes have their value as expressing something of the high tone and bearing which English merchants now assumed, lie enters upon his description all but overwhelmed by the magnitude to which the commerce of
