co-operation of its correspondents for the realisation of the system developed in his Novum Organon; and perhaps a later outgrowth of this association of the learned may have been the intellectual club, which held its meetings at the Mermaid Tavern in Friday Street, with the foundation of which Raleigh has also been credited. Here Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Donne, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Cotton, with many other "souls of poets dead and gone," met in unrestrained and congenial intercourse. Here men of thought and men of action were brought together in a fellowship to which few periods of the world's history can afford a parallel; and we may well assume that many a shrewd and pithy saying, gleaned from the encounters of wit which took place in such surroundings, many an experience of strenuous life here recounted to eager listeners have passed into the familiar texts in which genius has incorporated them.

A horror of persecution and a genuine love of toleration were characteristic of Raleigh throughout his public life, and as a consequence he was perhaps more unpopular with the clergy of his day than with any other class. It was in this spirit that he undertook the defence of Udall, who, once a minister of the Established Church, had become a Nonconformist, and was condemned to death for having published a book which was most unjustifiably represented as libellous to the Queen. Raleigh induced Elizabeth to reprieve the sentence, but release was deferred till Udall died in prison. So, again, in the Parliament of 1593 he contested the expediency of expelling sectarians from England, pleading even on behalf of the troublesome and aggressive congregation

of the Brownists. He was in advance of his age in opposing an enactment making the attendance of public worship compulsory under pain of banishment. "What danger may grow to ourselves," he urged, "if this law pass, were fit to be considered. It is to be feared that men not guilty will be included in it; and that law is hard, that taketh life, and sendeth into banishment, when men's intentions shall be judged by a jury, and they shall be judges what another man meant.' It is not strange that Raleigh, who was diligent to promote the spirit of free inquiry, should have been the object of violent attacks from the Jesuits. The proclamation suppressing their seminaries in England was issued upon Raleigh's advice, and his action was never forgiven by that uncompromising and vigilant Order. Having offended the hierarchies of either religion, he was inevitably branded with the name of Atheist. His constant association with Hariot, who was known to reject many portions of the Old Testament, and was popularly reported to be a Deist, lent colour to the charge of unorthodoxy; and it is possible that he had held conferences with the notorious Giordano Bruno, who between 1583 and 1585 visited England, where he dedicated a dialogue to Sir Philip Sidney. Such a charge would be readily made against so original a thinker in days when the slightest departure from accepted traditions was stigmatised as heretical. There are, however, many passages in Raleigh's written works which illustrate the real devotional attitude of his mind, especially in the Treatise on the Soul, in his Instructions to his Son, and in what Charles Kingsley with pardonable enthusiasm has described as the most God-fearing

and God-seeing history known. He may have explored fields of speculation forbidden to the narrow theology of his time, but his last words upon the scaffold, uttered when he stood at the dark brink of death, remain as an eloquent and convincing profession of faith.

Such was Raleigh at the zenith of his influence and favour. He came, he saw, he conquered. But his rapid advancement, his proud, unyielding, and impulsive temperament raised up around him a crowd of jealous ill-wishers, and like all royal favourites he incurred his full share of popular antipathy, so much so in fact that he was described in 1587, perhaps without exaggeration, as the best-hated man in court, city, and country. Leicester was still absent from England, and Hatton had withdrawn with offended dignity into the country. He had met with scarcely an obstacle on his triumphant progress. Suddenly a shadow crossed his path. The young Earl of Essex, who had joined Leicester in the Low Countries, where he was knighted on the field of Zutphen, after the famous charge in which Sir Philip Sidney lost his life, returned to Court. Young, handsome, brilliantly endowed and born in the purple, he was recognised as a fit successor to the lamented Sidney, and the intriguers at the palace at once combined to set him up as a rival to the detested Captain of the Guard. The antagonism of Essex and Raleigh was immediate, and, if at times they dissembled their mutual antipathy, it none the less remained irreconcilable.

CHAPTER IV

VIRGINIA

1585

FROM childhood's days the young Gilberts and Raleighs had been familiar with the sea. The little port of Budleigh Salterton is only some three miles distant from Hayes Barton. Compton is but an easy walk from Torquay, and the manor of Greenaway, the favourite residence of the Gilberts, is situated on a headland running out into a deep-water reach of the river two miles above Dartmouth. There is little doubt

that their parents, like so many of the Western gentry, had adventured their fortunes in the sea, and that the boys were early trained in all that belongs to a sailor's calling. These little harbours of the West-country were the playground of their youth, and the advent of the homeward-bound with tales of the world beyond the sky line, was the event which broke the monotony of isolated country life. Not a village in that pleasant moorland country leaning to the Dart, but had sent forth some of its sons on the path of adventure with Strangways or Tremayne, and there such knowledge of the great new continents as had been brought home to

England, mingled with fable and fancy, could be picked up at first-hand from veterans who had sailed with the elder Hawkins. A sailor boy of humble origin from the neighbouring parish of Sandridge, whose name is for ever written large across the map of the world, may well, as has been suggested with picturesque plausibility, have acted as henchman to the Squire's sons in their expeditions down the green river reaches, to explore the mysteries of the ships and the magic of the sea. Indeed, they could hardly have failed in such close proximity to have drawn into their circle that John Davis whom in after years men vied in eager rivalry to follow, for the love of his generous heart and the smile that lurked behind his ruddy beard, beyond the limit of Arctic snows and across the burning tropic The circumstances of youth and the spirit of the age thus alike prepared them for great enterprises, and when at length opportunity came they embraced it with an eager zest.

seas.

Sir Humphrey, the second of the three Gilbert sons, whose career in many respects anticipates that of his illustrious half-brother, was destined for the profession of the law, but early abandoned the studies for which he had prepared himself at Eton and at Oxford to follow the more active life of arms. He served in France and Ireland, where he acted as Governor of Munster, and again in the Netherlands. But his thoughts had never ceased to flow in the channel of early associations, and he had continually occupied his mind with the problems of navigation and the study and amendment of sea-cards, as the early charts were then called. The fruits of these studies and the real