[...]the world's wonder that might very likely be true. London was place in which a man could easily remain inert. The unexpected constantly occurred on account of the dramatic way that news was inevitably brought. News came like vivid flashes of light on darkness, and these flashes were continual. Ralegh's energy had always been conspicuous, even in those times. He was slug, as Aubrey pithily puts it. And w it is that one of the great ideas of his life came to him, perhaps the greatest. We hear of him as connected with Sir Humfrey Gilbert's enterprise for discovering the rth-west passage. Sir Humfrey was instigated by his navigator's desire to find a nearer passage to the East. But Ralegh widened in his mind the scope of the scheme, with him it expanded into something immeasurably greater. He saw the overcrowding of London beyond the limits of health and of comfort, and this overcrowding was troubling the level head of the great Burghley, who tried to cope with it by restricting the building of[...].