wonders what ailed Will Shakespeare that it never found a lodging in his brain. For him El Dorado never ceased to be located somewhere among his native Cotswold hills, and he never conceived a vision of more radiant and infectious felicity than that picture of Master Shallow’s orchard, ‘where, in an arbour, we will eat a last year’s pippin of my own graffing, with a dish of caraways, and so forth;’[1] while Cousin Silence grows amiably drunk, and the good varlet Davy unfolds the merits of an arrant knave, William Visor of Wincot, who must needs be countenanced against the honest man, Clement Perkes of the Hill.
Spenser’s vision leaps from East to Western Ind, dilating on ‘th’ Indian Peru,’ ‘the Amazon’s huge river,’ or ‘fruitfullest Virginia,’ invoking ceaselessly
That long hath wandred in the ocean wide,
Oft sous’d in swelling Tethys’ saltish tear.’
In Marlowe, Tamburlaine dreams of
Barrabas of
That trade in metal of the purest mould,’
and Faustus of the ‘huge argosies’ that drag
That yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury.’
Shakespeare never mentions Virginia and names America only once, in the early Comedy of Errors. Once, in a bit of comic prose, he lets Maria allude with betraying carelessness to ‘the new map with the aug-
- ↑ 2 Henry IV, V. iii.
