The Epic of England has yet to be written. It may be that the fulness of time for writing it has not come yet, or it may be that Britain is still waiting for her Homer and her Virgil. Perhaps the matured genius of a Rudyard Kipling, that strong, sweet Singer of the Seven Seas, may some day address itself to the accomplishment of this most splendid of all possible tasks, and then, again, it may be that it is his only to sound the prelude. That is a matter for the gods to decide in their own good

I WILLIAM THE NORMAN It may strike those of my readers who have only got their history from their school-books as somewhat strange that I should begin my record of British Empire-Makers with a man whom they have been taught to look upon as a foreigner, an invader, a conqueror, and a ruthless oppressor of the English. The answer is simple, though manifold. The school-books are only filled with potted facts, and are therefore wrong and unreliable. It has been well said that England was made on the

II EDWARD OF THE LONG LEGS Two centuries all but nine years have passed away since William the Conqueror, unwept, if not unhonoured, lost his life in avenging a paltry joke, and left his work for others to carry on. In the two centuries not much has been done, although no little show has been made meanwhile, and a great clash of arms has resounded through the world. William the Red has died, as he lived, in a somewhat ignoble and futile manner. Henry I. has done one good thing, wedding, as it we

III THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE Another couple of centuries with a few added years have slipped away, and the next scene of the slowly-unfolding drama opens on the sea instead of the land. The Idea which Edward of the Long Legs had so clearly conceived and so very nearly realised, the idea that the frontiers of the United Kingdom of which he had dreamt should be its sea-coasts has all the time been growing and deepening, for, like all ideas which faithfully reflect some fact in the universe, it co

IV OLIVER CROMWELL “He is perhaps the only example which history affords of one man having governed the most opposite events and proved sufficient for the most various destinies.” No man’s character was ever so completely and so tersely summed up as the great Oliver’s is here in these few words of a critic belonging to another race and nation, and, as regards his varied destinies, it may be added that no man ever was raised up and set to work by the Controller of human destinies as opportunely a

V WILLIAM OF ORANGE It is perhaps one of the most curious facts of our history that the Empire-Maker who, as it were, finally completed the work begun by his namesake William the Norman, should, like him, have been a foreigner, should have sprung from similar ancestry, and should have been his exact reverse in every mental and physical quality save one—an inflexible determination to do the work which he was appointed to do in spite of every conceivable kind of obstacle. It is noteworthy also tha

VI JAMES COOK Once more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on the ideal equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time-gulf some half-century wide. This time we alight on the morning of Monday, July 5, 1742, before the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which is devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to the drapery business. This shop is situated in a little village on the Yorkshire coast a few miles from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The Staithes, s

VII LORD CLIVE It is one of the distinctions of Robert Clive to be at once the model of all bad boys and the forlorn hope of their despairing fathers. He was probably the very worst boy that ever became a really great man. Of his early youth there is absolutely nothing good to be said, saving only the fact that he was possessed of that brute, bulldog courage which thousands of English boys, whose names have never been heard beyond their native towns, have possessed in common with him. He was idl

VIII WARREN HASTINGS Both in point of time and personal capacity, Warren Hastings, first Governor-General of the British Empire in India, was the successor of Robert, Lord Clive. At the same time it may be as well to point out in this connection that there might be more literal correctness in describing Warren Hastings as an Empire-Preserver rather than an Empire-Maker. It was the victor of Plassey who rough-hewed the stones upon which the now gorgeous fabric of our Indian Empire stands. It was

IX NELSON I am conscious of more difficulties ahead in beginning this sketch than I have felt with regard to any other of the series, for, while on the one hand it would be absurd to omit from the glorious ranks of our Empire-Makers the most glorious of them all, it is at the same time practically impossible to say anything fresh or even anything that is not very generally known about the man who, however much he may once have been slighted, and however inadequately his earlier services may have

X WELLINGTON There is a very considerable amount of uncertainty, and there are also a few somewhat remarkable coincidences associated with the early youth of Arthur Wesley, better known to fame under the expanded form Wellesley, son of Garret, Earl of Mornington, and his wife Ann Hill, one of the daughters of Lord Dungannon. It is somewhat singular, for instance, that the birthday of a child born in such a position should not be known within a day or two. His mother, who ought to have spoken wit

XI “CHINESE GORDON” We are living rather too near to the days of the man himself, to be able to say what place History will ultimately assign to the greatest and most famous of the old fighting stock of the Gordons. Probably the discriminating historian of the day after to-morrow will look upon him ethnologically as a queer survival or throwback—a man who lived and did his work in the nineteenth century in the style of the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth. In the military sense he would seem to

XII CECIL RHODES Although there are obvious difficulties in the way of writing at once without fear and without favour of a man who is unquestionably one of the great ones of the earth while he is still alive, there are yet two very cogent reasons why Cecil Rhodes should be the subject of this concluding essay. In the first place, he is the last of our Empire-Makers in order of time, and, in the second place, he has done his empire-making in the last region of the earth in which this empire, or