Sir Francis Drake was honourably received by the Benchers in this Hall after his victories in the West Indies (1586), and in the Hall, below the daïs, is a serving-table made out of the timber of his ship, the _Golden Hind_. He had been admitted, _honoris causa_, to the Society of the Inner Temple four years earlier. Other famous Elizabethan seamen were admitted at the Middle Temple in the persons of Sir Martin Frobisher, Admiral Norris, Sir Francis Vere (all in 1592), and Sir John Hawkins (1594). Taken in conjunction with the fact that Richard Hakluyt, the elder, was a Bencher of the Middle Temple; that Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been admitted to membership of the Inn in 1575, placed the expedition he sent out in 1602 under the command of Bartholomew Gosnold, another Middle Templar; that the records show that several members of the Middle Temple were interested in the early development of Virginia; and that the Inn possesses the only existing copy of the ‘Molyneux Globes,’ this and other indications seem to justify Mr. Bedwell’s contention[38] that ‘the colonizing enterprises of the closing years of the sixteenth century were closely associated with the Middle Temple,’ and that on both sides of the Atlantic members of that Inn took a prominent part in the ‘birth of the American Nation.’ This connection with the Colonies, natural, necessary and profitable both to those new countries, which thus obtained the services of educated men--Governors trained in knowledge of affairs, and Attorney-Generals imbued with the high traditions of English Law--and to the Inns themselves, which were thus kept in touch with the New World, is illustrated by the fact that the Middle Temple is represented by no less than five of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Of these, Thomas McKean is said to have written the Constitution of Delaware in a single night. And of the other four, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Lynch, Thomas Heyward, and Arthur Midleton--all Representatives of South Carolina--the first is believed to have drafted the greater part of the Constitution of that State, and was afterwards Chairman of the Committee of Five who drafted the first Constitution of the United States. Meanwhile the literary and dramatic tradition of the Middle Temple was continued by such members of the Society as Congreve, Wycherley, Ford, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Shadwell, King William’s Poet Laureate, who lives in Dryden’s Satire. Later, that tradition was continued by Sheridan, Thomas Moore, Thomas de Quincey, and Henry Hallam, the historian of the Middle Ages.