nd that instinct and tradition, like most such national
instincts and traditions, is sound.

In the epoch which most of us can remember pretty vividly--for it came
to an abrupt end less than five years ago--when people were anxious to
prove that everything important in human history had been done by
"Teutons," there was a great effort to show that Columbus was not really
the first European discoverer of America; that that honour belonged
properly to certain Scandinavian sea-captains who at some time in the
tenth or eleventh centuries paid a presumably piratical visit to the
coast of Greenland. It may be so, but the incident is quite irrelevant.
That one set of barbarians from the fjords of Norway came in their
wanderings in contact with another set of barbarians living in the
frozen lands north of Labrador is a fact, if it be a fact, of little or
no historical import. The Vikings had no more to teach the Esquimaux
than had the Esquimaux to teach the Vikings. Both were at that time
outside the real civilization of Europe.

Columbus, on the other hand, came from the very centre of European
civilization and that at a time when that civilization was approaching
the summit of one of its constantly recurrent periods of youth and
renewal. In the North, indeed, what strikes the eye in the fifteenth
century is rather the ugliness of a decaying order--the tortures, the
panic of persecution, the morbid obsession of the _danse macabre_--things
which many think of as Mediaeval, but which belong really only to the
Middle Ages when old and near to death. But all the South was already
full of the new youth of the Renaissance. Boccaccio had lived, Leonardo
was at the height of his glory. In the fields of Touraine was already
playing with his fellows the boy that was to be Rabelais.

Such adventures as that of Columbus, despite his pious intentions with
regard to the Khan of Tartary, were a living part of the Renaissance and
were full of its spirit, and it is from the Renaissance that American
civilization dates. It is an important point to remember about America,
and especially about the English colonies which were to become the
United States, that they have had no memory of the Middle Ages. They had
and have, on the other hand, a real, formative memory of Pagan antiquity,
for the age in which the oldest of them were born was full of enthusiasm
for that memory, while it thought, as most Americans still think, of the
Middle Ages as a m