h-west passage, and studying the
necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies for them in
colonisation and extended markets for home manufactures. Gilbert was
examined before the Queen's Majesty and the Privy Council, and the
record of his examination he has himself left to us in a paper which he
afterwards drew up, and strange enough reading it is. The most admirable
conclusions stand side by side with the wildest conjectures.

Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove that the ocean
runs round the three old continents, and that America therefore is
necessarily an island. The Gulf Stream, which he had carefully observed,
eked out by a theory of the _primum mobile_, is made to demonstrate a
channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's Straits in the south,
Gilbert believing, in common with almost everyone of his day, that these
straits were the only opening into the Pacific, and the land to the
South was unbroken to the Pole. He prophesies a market in the East for
our manufactured linen and calicoes:--

The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth in Hester, where
the pomp is expressed of the great King of India, Ahasuerus, who
matched the coloured clothes wherewith his houses and tents were
apparelled, with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure.

These and other such arguments were the best analysis which Sir Humfrey
had to offer of the spirit which he felt to be working in him. We may
think what we please of them; but we can have but one thought of the
great grand words with which the memorial concludes, and they alone
would explain the love which Elizabeth bore him:--

Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any laudable
and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure or idleness we
purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame abideth for
ever.

Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to live and die in
this mind: that he is not worthy to live at all that, for fear or
danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honour,
seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal,
wherefore in this behalf _mutare vel timere sperno_.

Two voyages which he undertook at his own cost, which shattered his
fortune, and failed, as they naturally might, since inefficient help or
mutiny of subordinates, or other disorders, are inevitable conditions
under which more or less