Now, there is beauty in the types, brief though they be, and on a very lowly subject: but how admirable is the antitype! It entirely redeems the thought from any associated meanness, carries it out to its full excellence, and clothes it with vestments of inspiration. Such, in truth, is Shakespeare’s great praise;—he can lift another man’s thought out of the dust, and make it a fitting ornament even for an archangel’s diadem.
One of Whitney’s finest Emblems, in point of conception and treatment, and, I believe, peculiar to himself, one of those “newly devised,” is founded on the sentiment, “By help of God” (p. 203).
Auxilio diuino.
To Richarde drake, Eſquier, in praiſe of
Sir Francis Drake Knight.
Whitney, 1586.
The representation is that of the hand of Divine Providence issuing from a cloud and holding the girdle which encompasses the earth. With that girdle Sir Francis Drake’s ship, “the Golden Hind,” was drawn and guided round the globe.
The whole Emblem possesses considerable interest,—for it relates to the great national event of Shakespeare’s youth,—the first accomplishment by Englishmen of the earth’s circumnavigation. With no more than 164 able-bodied men, in five small ships, little superior to boats with a deck, the adventurous commander set sail 13th December, 1577; he went by the Straits of Magellan, and on his return doubled the Cape of Good Hope, the 15th of March, 1580, having then only fifty-seven men and three casks of water. The perilous voyage was ended at Plymouth, September the 26th, 1580, after an absence of two years and ten months.