Drake’s reception at home was an enthusiastic one, by a populace always anxious for a hero. It was tempered somewhat by the cautious feelings of some, who regarded with no favorable eye the policy of private reprisals upon another nation in time of peace. The Queen had no such compunctions. She received him with undisguised favor, dined with him on board his ship, and made him a knight. She directed that the vessel which had borne her authority about the world should be carefully preserved; and when the ship was finally broken up, John Davis, the Arctic navigator, caused a chair to be made of the timbers, which is now one of the relics of interest in the Bodleian Library, and within whose seat Abraham Cowley wrote one of his well-known poems. At length, in 1585, Queen Elizabeth determined on open hostility, and giving Drake his first royal commission, and an ample fleet and land force, he started on his successful expedition to the Spanish main, when town after town fell into his hands, and the Spanish settlements experienced most poignantly ravages similar to those which they had so abundantly for nearly a century inflicted upon the natives of those regions. Of his subsequent exploits in European waters this is no place for the recital; but in 1595 he prevailed upon Elizabeth to put him, in connection with his old patron and companion, Sir John Hawkins, once more in command of another expedition to Spanish America. They sailed from Plymouth in August, with the purpose of seizing Nombre de Dios, and then of marching his twenty-five hundred troops to Panama to capture the treasure which took that route from Peru on its way to Spain. The expedition was a melancholy failure. The Spaniards were forewarned. Porto Rico successfully resisted the English in the first place, and the attack on Panama was abortive. Hawkins died, overcome by the reverses; and Drake, struck with a fever of mortification, sank beneath the fatal influences of the climate, and died on board his ship early in the following year. His remains were placed in a leaden casket and sunk off Puerto Cabello, and there was no failure of suspicions that he had been the victim of foul play. There are those in the English nation who indulge the hope that the casket may yet be recovered, and that the remains of the great English “Dragon” may yet rest beneath the pavement of Westminster Abbey. CRITICAL ESSAY ON DRAKE’S BAY. THE question where was the “convenient and fit harbor,” the “fair and good bay,” which Drake entered on the Pacific coast, and where he careened and repaired the “Pelican,” is still undecided, after much discussion by the Californian geographers, who have now their capital in the city of San Francisco,—on that matchless land-locked harbor which is entered by the narrow passage known as the “Golden Gate.” The authorities are not many, and are not quite in accord.