He was educated at Eton and Oxford, but his heart was ever in seamanship. He talked so learnedly about his profession that news of his prowess came to the ears of Walsingham, who rehearsed them to the Queen. Hence it came that Humphrey Gilbert was examined before her Majesty and the Privy Council: a record of this examination was drawn up by Humphrey and still exists. He was "for 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"; he had already begun to invent instruments for taking observations and for studying the shape of the earth. But his great idea was to form colonies in the New World and find an outlet for trade and a population growing too thick upon English soil. His manner and intelligence left a great impression upon the Virgin Queen, for he reminded her more of her favourite Greek philosophers than of a blunt English squire. Sir Otho must have died when Humphrey was about twelve years old, and his mother then married Mr. Raleigh of Hayes; he was a country gentleman of slender means, living in a modest grange in a village between Sidmouth and Exmouth. Whether her three boys accompanied her we do not know; but when Walter Raleigh was a boy, he used to visit his half-brothers at Compton Castle, amid the apple orchards of Torbay, or at the Greenaway manor-house. We can imagine how that imaginative child would sit by the river and listen to the stories of his half-brothers, drinking in a love of adventure, a hatred of religious persecution, and a belief in God's providence. For the river was full of quaint vessels from every port, and the sailors were full of moving stories of the prisons of the Inquisition, or the sufferings of the Netherlanders; and the Gilberts had been brought up by their mother to see the hand of God in all the great events of life. As one of Frobisher's men said, when describing the great tussle with the ice-floes, "The ice was strong, but God was stronger." We may be sure that one of the most critical moments in Walter Raleigh's education was the time when he stayed with the Gilberts, and listened to ideas of empire and duty which only a few in any age have been inspired to feel and know and carry into practice.