ss the
centuries: but what a life must that have been of which this was the
conclusion! We have glimpses of him a few years earlier, when he won his
spurs in Ireland--won them by deeds which to us seem terrible in their
ruthlessness, but which won the applause of Sir Henry Sidney as too high
for praise or even reward. Chequered like all of us with lines of light
and darkness, he was, nevertheless, one of a race which has ceased to
be. We look round for them, and we can hardly believe that the same
blood is flowing in our veins. Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps
as they, but the high moral grace which made bravery and strength so
beautiful is departed from us for ever.

Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait painting; but we must
find room for another of that Greenaway party whose nature was as fine
as that of Gilbert, and who intellectually was more largely gifted. The
latter was drowned in 1583. In 1585 John Davis left Dartmouth on his
first voyage into the Polar seas; and twice subsequently he went again,
venturing in small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the
most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable for their success
as for the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph
is written on the map of the world, where his name still remains to
commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a
peculiar and exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little
facts of his life, seems to have affected everyone with whom he came in
contact in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of Master
Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him, without other hope or
motion; we find silver bullets cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard
rude natures of the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage
which was not like that of a common man. He has written the account of
one of his northern voyages himself; one of those, by-the-by, which the
Hakluyt Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative beauty in
it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is called out in him by the
first sight of strange lands and things and people.

To show what he was, we should have preferred, if possible, to have
taken the story of his expedition into the South Seas, in which, under
circumstances of singular difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under
whom he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials from famine, mutiny,
and storm, ultimatel