o face with some of these men; not, of course,
to write their biographies, but to sketch the details of a few scenes,
in the hope that they may tempt those under whose eyes they may fall to
look for themselves to complete the perfect figure.

Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once among the most
important harbours in England, on a projecting angle of land which runs
out into the river at the head of one of its most beautiful reaches,
there has stood for some centuries the Manor House of Greenaway. The
water runs deep all the way to it from the sea, and the largest vessels
may ride with safety within a stone's throw of the windows. In the
latter half of the sixteenth century there must have met, in the hall of
this mansion, a party as remarkable as could have been found anywhere in
England. Humfrey and Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter
Raleigh, here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of
Long Stream; in the summer evenings doubtless rowing down with the tide
to the port, and wondering at the quaint figure-heads and carved prows
of the ships which thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening,
with hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth beyond the
sunset. And here in later life, matured men, whose boyish dreams had
become heroic action, they used again to meet in the intervals of quiet,
and the rock is shown underneath the house where Raleigh smoked the
first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of whom we shall presently speak
more closely, could not fail to have made a fourth at these meetings. A
sailor boy of Sandwich, the adjoining parish, John Davis, showed early a
genius which could not have escaped the eye of such neighbours, and in
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 nort