I will not seek the authority upon which that brave old tradition rests, and a malison, I say, upon all who would whittle away our most cherished beliefs. Cold-blooded commentators tell us that the famous expression, “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders,” was not uttered, and declare, contrary from general belief, that the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo never said, “Up Guards, and at ’em!” and very likely some one, somewhere, has made hash of the heart-stirring tradition of Plymouth Hoe and claimed to prove something craven and mean. Sufficient for me, however, the story with which the Muse of History has hitherto been content. For centuries the memories of that soul-stirring victory over the Invincible abode only in the minds of Englishmen and between the covers of history-books, but in these latter days, these post-heroic days of criticism and commemoration, when all the great men are dead and all the great deeds done, and we have for some time been engaged upon raising monuments to the deeds and to the men who wrought them, or criticising and explaining the why and the how and the uses, or the uselessness it may be, of those men and the work of their hands,—in these latter days, I say, an Armada Memorial has been set up upon the historic Hoe. It is a tall pedestal, embellished with bronze plates and medallions, and bearing the inscription, “He blew with His winds and they were scattered,” and with the virago figure of a helmeted Britannia rushing in tempestuous petticoats, atop. Close at hand is the statue of Sir Francis Drake, that brilliant member of a brilliant group of Devonian Elizabethans; one who, like Raleigh, in his time played many parts, was foremost among those scourges of Spain we bred in those spacious days, pirate, filibuster, patriot, benefactor, and the first to circumnavigate the globe. Little wonder, then, that the name of Drake is honoured, even yet, in Plymouth. They honour his memory so jealously every year, at the Corporation visit to the weirs, not because of his martial exploits and the services he rendered the nation, but for the benefit he conferred upon Plymouth by bringing its water-supply from the inexhaustible springs of Dartmoor; and thus, in piously exclaiming, “May the descendants of him who brought us water never want for wine,” the Mayor sinks the repute of the Imperialist of the Elizabethan age in that of the local benefactor.