And this mind, so daring, so original, so diverse, which could turn a sonnet or design a battleship (for the _Ark Raleigh_, built after his plans, was admittedly the best ship of our fleet that met the Armada), which had experienced the favour and disfavour of princes in the fullest degree, which had known triumph and discouragement beyond the ordinary measure of humanity, turned in the last dark years of imprisonment to a steady contemplation of human activity, and, largely conceiving here, as in all else, planned a "History of the World." Let his own noble words be his epitaph:
"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, 'Hic jacet.'"
And then there was Drake--Drake, whose name perhaps overshadows all other names in Devon; Drake, who
"was playing a rubber of bowls When the great Armada came;"
but, being told of the sighting of the fleet, remarked that "they must wait their turn, good souls," and continued his game; Drake, who, the year before the sailing of the Armada, "singed the 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.