he King of Spain's
beard" most mightily, going up and down the coasts of Spain and
Portugal, plundering and burning the ships in their very harbours; who
sailed round the world, with the sun for "fellow traveller," as an
epitaph under his portrait in the Guildhall says of him; who, on the
first independent expedition which he led to America, received a
dangerous wound in his attack on Nombre de Dios, but concealed it from
his men, and led them to the public treasury, telling them "that he had
brought them to the mouth of the treasury of the world," and then
fainted over the great bars of silver and gold, and when they took him
up he was losing "so much blood as filled his very footsteps in the
sand;" Drake, who has become a legend and a myth in Devon, so that the
country-people say that he brought water from Dartmoor to Plymouth, by
compelling a stream to follow his horse's heels all the way into the
town; who, like King Arthur and Barbarossa, is not dead, but will
return again to his country if his people in their need strike on his
drum and call him.

But beyond and behind all these great names, which ring in our ears
like martial music, are the nameless crowd of Devon men who sailed with
them, and fought with them, and worked with them, and loved them. Men
from Bideford and Appledore and Barnstaple, from Teignmouth and
Budleigh and Dartmouth, from every little harbour along the bold north
coast, from every creek and bay of the south, from the sheltered
villages among their trees, from the wind-swept, hilly little towns,
from the busy quayside or the lonely farm, came the men whose courage
and whose will, whose love of profit and greater love of adventure,
gave a lustre to England in the "golden days of Elizabeth."

Those days passed, and were followed presently by the unhappy years of
the great Civil Wars. It was perhaps not unfitting that a
Grenville--Sir Bevil Grenville--led an army against the Parliamentarian
troops in the Battle of Lansdown Hill, though it was an army of
Cornishmen he led, and not of Devonshire men, for the Grenvilles were
then living at their Cornish home of Stowe. Sir Bevil was killed in
battle, but Anthony Payne, his servant, a great giant of a man, and a
true friend to his master, set Sir Bevil's young son upon his father's
horse, and bade him lead his father's men to victory, as, had he lived,
his father would have done. Afterwards Anthony Payne brought Sir
Bevil's body back to Stowe,