hero in a private letter, dated May 19,
1626, of Dr. Meddus to the Rev. Joseph Mead:[3]--"Yesterday being Holy
Thursday, one Pyke, a common soldier, left behind the fleet at Cadiz,
delivered a challenge to the Duke of Buckingham from the Marquis of ----,
brother-in-law to the Conde d'Olivares, in defence of the honour of his
sister; affirming, moreover, that he had wronged Olivares, the King of
Spain, and the King of England, and therefore he would fight with him in
any part of France. This Pike, a Devonshire man, being presented
prisoner to the Duke of Medina, he would needs have him fight at rapier
or dagger with a Spaniard, supposing he would not stand him two thrusts:
but Pyke, by a dexterous sleight, presently disarmed the Spaniard of his
rapier without hurting him, and presented it to the Duke," &c.

As to the authorship of the play, though I should be loth to speak with
positiveness, I feel bound to put forward a claim for Thomas Heywood.
Through all Heywood's writings there runs a vein of generous kindliness:
everywhere we see a gentle, benign countenance, radiant with love and
sympathy. On laying down one of his plays, the reader is inclined to
apply to him Tacitus' judgment of Agricola, "bonum virum facile
crederes, magnum libenter." Now, when we open _Dick of Devonshire_, the
naturalness and simplicity of the first scene at once suggest Heywood's
hand. In the second scene, the spirited eulogy on Drake--

"That glory of his country and Spayne's terror,
That wonder of the land and the seas minyon,
_Drake_, of eternall memory--"

and the fine lines descriptive of the Armada are just such as we might
expect from the author of the closing scenes of the second part of _If
you know not me, you know nobody_. Heywood was fond of stirring
adventures: he is quite at home on the sea, and delights in nothing more
than in describing a sea-fight; witness his _Fortunes by Land and Sea_,
and the two parts of the _Fair Maid of the West_. But the underplot
bears even clearer traces of Heywood's manner. Manuel is one of those
characters he loved to draw--a perfect Christian gentleman, incapable of
baseness in word or deed. Few situations could be found more touching
than the scene (iii. 3), where Manuel defends with passionate
earnestness the honour of his absent brother, Henrico, and tries to
comfort his heart-broken father. Heywood dealt in extremes: his
characters are, as a rule, either faultless gentlemen or ab