The first of modern colonial empires, the dominion of the Portuguese on the coasts and seas of Africa and India is in one sense more interesting than any of its successors. For it is, of course, essentially and peculiarly connected with the beginnings of that expansion of Europe and Christendom which, above all else, marks off the modern from the mediæval world. In other words, the growth of Portugal through discovery into a position of commercial and naval leadership is of general value to the whole of the Western world, in a way that is not shared by the similar and later growth of Spain, Holland, France or England. The development of these states belongs mainly to their own history. Immensely as they influenced one another, they none of them, to the same extent as Portugal, opened the way by which alone Europe could expand at all. None of them can rival her in the credit of breaking down the middle wall of superstitious terror which parted the unknown worlds along and beyond the ocean from the Christendom of Dante and Chaucer. None of them, in the same special originative way, can claim the glory that Camoens claims for his nation, the glory of
Opening up those wastes of tide,
No generation openèd before.