THE FAMILY AND HEIRS OF SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.*
THE annals of a family of any importance are usually worth recording if the writer is content with a limited public. He will have for his readers in almost every case the members of the family to which his book relates, as well as the few out- siders who happen to be busy with some by-way of general or local history. Upon the larger public outside he can hardly expect—perhaps hardly cares—to make the same impression. We can easily understand, indeed, the pleasure it gave Lady Eliott-Drake to find that the memoranda of a certain Lady Drake, wife of the third baronet, afforded a clue to the meaning of a bundle of eighteenth-century letters which had been preserved "for the justification of one of the writers, yet without any explanation of the circumstance which had led to the correspondence." It cannot be said, however, that this explanation, now that it is afforded, is worth making public except "from a family point of view." But as this is all that Lady Eliott-Drake claims for it no one has any right to complain except the owner of these stately volumes—if there be one—who bought them without ascertaining the nature of their contents. Even he will find stray letters here and there which relieve the com- plicated details of wills and marriage settlements, the management of property and the conduct of elections. We give part of one from Captain Samuel Drake to his sister, written at Portsmouth on the day after Admiral Byng's execu- tion. "At five minutes before twelve he came out of his cabin on the quarter-deck, with his hat under his arm, turned about and smiled, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, tied it with two knots over his eyes, kneeled down on his left knee, laid his hat down on his right side, and immediately dropped another handkerchief as a signal to fire. . . . From the time he left the cabin to his death it would make a minute, and he did not speak one word on the deck. Before he left the cabin he told Captain Montague that he could not accuse himself of either cowardice or disaffection; if he erred in point of judg- ment from the court-martial, he was sorry for it and hoped
God would forgive him." The book may be specially com- mended to Devonshire readers. The names of well-known old Devonshire families occur and recur at every wedding or funeral. Outside the county it may be less popular, but as the county is a large one, and its people knit together with unusual closeness, Lady Eliott-Drake's industry will not, we may hope, go unrewarded.
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