Bridgwater boasts one famous son; Robert Blake, the great Admiral, or rather, General-at-Sea, of the Commonwealth, who taught foreign nations in general, and the Dutch in particular, who wanted the lesson badly, the respect due to England. His birthplace is still standing in this his native town, in a quiet byway, where tall, staid eighteenth-century merchants’ residences look down, as it were with a certain condescension, upon the less imposing house in which the hero was first introduced to a troubled world, in 1599. It is a comfortable, rather than a stately, house; but it was built to last. It is the oldest house now remaining in the town, and was probably built in the early years of the sixteenth century, the interior disclosing a greater antiquity than would be suspected from the frontage. Huge, roughly squared oak timbers frame the walls and cross the ceilings with immense rafters. They had been all carefully covered up some generations ago, and their existence hidden by plaster and wall-papering; but recent repairs of the house have resulted in all this honest construction being again disclosed; and very noble, in the rugged old way, it looks. During the progress of these repairs and alterations, the plaster on the walls of an upper room was found to have been liberally scratched and otherwise drawn upon at a period contemporary with Admiral Blake. Sketches of ships were prominent among these rough _sgraffiti_: ships built and rigged in a manner characteristic of the seventeenth century, and the words “Rex Carolus” appeared among them. It was necessary, for the repair of the walls, to cover up most of these sketches, but the best have been carefully preserved. Robert Blake’s father was a merchant, with more children (a round dozen of them) than business. His mother came of an old landed family; the Williamses of Planesfield. Robert himself was sent to Oxford and was in residence there, chiefly at Wadham College, fifteen years, wishful of becoming a Fellow, but finally balked of that ambition for an easeful life. It is curious to contemplate that old possibility of this stout man of war having ever become a cloistral butt of futile learning, of the peculiar brand of futility affected by Oxford.