But while we can picture all these things, with sufficient readiness, it yet remains certain that we know nothing of the hero’s earlier years, and but vaguely gather that from Oxford, whither he was sent, he went to the wars on the Continent, between the Protestants and the Catholics, and then, by some occult family influence, became attached to the brilliant Court of our own astounding virginal Gloriana. They were a coruscating Renaissance group, who circled round Elizabeth, and were gifted in a singular variety of ways. They were noblemen and gentlemen who could, and did, turn their hands to anything, from captaining some desperate enterprise, negotiating treaties, steering frail flotillas through unknown seas into unheard-of lands, buccaneering, and filibustering, down to duelling, intriguing and backbiting among each other; practising literature and the liberal art of sonneteering, and dallying in the dangerous pastime of flirting with that too towardly Queen herself. One thing only they could not do; they could not be commonplace. None may say how much of truth, or how much legend there may be in the famous story of how Raleigh first attracted the Queen’s notice by flinging down his velvet cloak over a muddy place, so that she might pass, clean-footed; but the story was current, in the time of those contemporary with both, and being possible at all, shows us the spirit of the time and of the Queen’s surroundings. Raleigh’s excellent early services in Ireland, where he broke down the rebellion in the south, recommended him to the Queen, his youthfulness interested her middle-aged sentimentalism, and his dark, florid manhood enslaved her. For this was a very hero in look, as in deed; standing six feet high, with black hair, full-bearded, ruddy-cheeked, like the apples of his native shire; and Elizabeth loaded him with gifts and grants. Meanwhile he had begun the colonising schemes and the exploratory enterprises by which his name is largely known. He equipped, and was at the cost of, the expedition which in 1584 discovered that shore of North America he christened, in honour of the “Eternal Maiden Queen,” “Virginia.” At the close of that year a knighthood rewarded his flattery. Already he was become a man of vast wealth, the holder of highly remunerative grants and monopolies, and was keenly desirous of refounding the house of Raleigh in visible form in Devon. To this end he wrote in July, 1584, to Mr. Duke of Otterton, into whose possession this farm of Hayes Barton had by some unexplained means come, desiring to repurchase it. The letter is still in existence, and runs: “MR. DUKE,