Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/519

 Conditions surrounding Settlement of Virginia 509 them ; but it was true that many Enghshmen of influence had a vivid realization that two nations of Europe, one far smaller, the other not inordinately larger than England, had obtained a great inheritance in the East and the West that England might have had, might even yet rival. The very first reference to the New World in English general literature is an expression of regret and vexa- tion on that account : O what thynge a had be than Yf that they that be englyshe men Myght have ben the furst of all That there shulde have take possessyon And made furst buyldynge and habytacion A memory perpetuall. And also what an honorable thynge Bothe to the realme and to the kynge To have had his domynyons extendynge There into so farre a grounde.' An early historian makes one party in the council of Henry VIII., as early as 15 11, say, "The Indies are discover'd, and vast treasure brought from thence every day. Let us therefore bend our endeavours thitherwards ; and if the Spanish and Portuguese suffer us not to join with them, there will be yet region enough for all to enjoy." - The well-known memorial sent by Robert Thorne, an English merchant resident in Seville, to Henry TII. in 1527, after speaking of the islands and territories belonging to the kings of Spain and Portugal, declares that in some of the earlier English expeditions, " if the marriners would have been ruled, and folowed their pilot's mind the lands of the 'cst Indies from whence all the gold commeth had beene ours ", and that even yet England might find lands under the equator no less rich in gold and spicery and no less profitable to her than theirs were to the kings of Spain and Portugal.' Richard Eden in the dedication of his Trcatyse of the Nezv India, published in 1553, again expresses regret that the faint-heartedness of the early English navigators prevented its coming to pass that the rich Peruvian treasury of the Spanish king at Seville was not in the Tower of London.^ In his Decades of the Mczv JVorld. published two years later, he refrains, naturally enough, from such a pious wish, as his book is dedicated ^ An Interlude of the Four Elements, written probably in 1519; printed in E. Arber, First Three English Books on America, pp. xx-xxi. = Lord Herbert of Cherbury, History of Henry VUI., under the year 1511. SHakluyt, II. 177. <E. .^rber, First Three English Books on America, p. 6.