gorges of Holne, or over the dreary downs of Hartland Warren, and the
cloud-capt thickets of Cator's Beam, and looking down from thence
upon the far blue southern sea, wondering when he shall sail thereon,
to fight the Spaniard, and discover, like Columbus, some fairy-land
of gold and gems.

For before this boy's mind, as before all intense English minds of
that day, rise, from the first, three fixed ideas, which yet are but
one--the Pope, the Spaniard, and America.

The two first are the sworn and internecine enemies (whether they
pretend a formal peace or not) of Law and Freedom, Bible and Queen,
and all that makes an Englishman's life dear to him. Are they not
the incarnations of Antichrist? Their Moloch sacrifices flame
through all lands. The earth groans because of them, and refuses to
cover the blood of her slain. And America is the new world of
boundless wonder and beauty, wealth and fertility, to which these two
evil powers arrogate an exclusive and divine right; and God has
delivered it into their hands; and they have done evil therein with
all their might, till the story of their greed and cruelty rings
through all earth and heaven. Is this the will of God? Will he not
avenge for these things, as surely as he is the Lord who executeth
justice and judgment in the earth?

These are the young boy's thoughts. These were his thoughts for
sixty-six eventful years. In whatsoever else he wavered, he never
wavered in that creed. He learnt it in his boyhood, while he read
'Fox's Martyrs' beside his mother's knee. He learnt it as a lad,
when he saw his neighbours Hawkins and Drake changed by Spanish
tyranny and treachery from peaceful merchantmen into fierce scourges