INDEX. 161 LIFE OF CAPTAIN MARRYAT. CHAPTER I. Frederick Marryat, one of the most brilliant, and the least fairly recognized, of English novelists, was born in Westminster, on the 10th July, 1792, some seven months before the outbreak of the Great War. He was the second son of Joseph Marryat, M.P. for Sandwich, chairman of the committee of Lloyds, and Colonial Agent for the island of Grenada. His mother was a Bostonian, of a loyalist family. Her maiden name was Geyer--or according to Mrs. Ross Church’s life of her father, Von Geyer--and the family is said to have been of Hessian origin. The Marryats themselves were a Suffolk stock. In Marshall’s “Naval Biography,” which appeared during Marryat’s own life, the novelist is said to have descended from one of the numerous Huguenot refugees who settled in the Eastern Counties during the persecutions of the sixteenth century. The family version of its history, as given by Mrs. Ross Church, contains a longer and more splendid pedigree, going back even to knights who came over with “Richard Conqueror.” These things, though set forth with faith no doubt, are to be received with polite reserve by the judicious reader. For the rest, whatever the remote origin of the Marryats may have been, they were during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very distinctly middle-class people--dissenting ministers, doctors, or business men--manifestly of good parts and industry. Some of them wrote sermons and printed them. Thomas Marryat, the novelist’s grandfather, was a doctor and the author of a medical book. His father was, as the places he held show, a prosperous man; and the future novelist entered the world under fairly favourable circumstances. There was, it is clear, no want of money, and the family were active people with a marked tendency to use their pens.