the atmosphere of
Greenaway he learned to be as noble as the Gilberts,
and as tender and delicate as Raleigh. Of this party,
for the present we confine ourselves to the host and
owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted afterwards by Elizabeth.
Led by the scenes of his childhood to the sea
and to sea adventures, and afterwards, as his mind
unfolded, to study his profession scientifically, we find
him as soon as he was old enough to think for himself,
or make others listen to him, "amending the great
errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to
make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one
common bigness;" inventing instruments for taking
observations, studying the form of the earth, and
convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and
studying the necessities of his country, and discovering
the remedies for them in colonization and extended
markets for home manufactures, and insisting with so
much loudness on these important matters that they
reached the all-attentive ears of Walsingham, and
through Walsingham were conveyed to the Queen.
Gilbert was examined before the Queen's Majesty and
the Privy Council, the record of which 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; and invaluable practical discoveries,
among imaginations at which all our love for him cannot
hinder us from smiling; the whole of it from first to last
saturated through and through with his inborn nobility
of nature.

Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove
that the ocean runs round the three old continents, and
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, he believing, in common with
almost every one of his day, that these straits were
the only opening into the Pacific, the land to the
south being unbroken to the Pole. He prophecies 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 s