the
Spaniards with a very generous admiration. 'So praised was Drake for his
valour of them, that were it not that he was a Lutheran, they said,
there was not the like man in the world.' Once, when the King invited a
lady of the Court to go in his barge on a lake near Madrid, 'the lady
said she dared not trust herself in the water even with his Majesty,
lest Sir Francis Drake should have her.' His name passed even into
nursery songs, and one of them has been translated as follows:

'My brother Don John
To England is gone,
To kill the Drake,
And the Queen to take,
And the heretics all to destroy;
And he will give me,
When he comes back,
A Lutheran boy,
With a chain on his neck,
And our Lady Grandmama shall have
To wait upon her a Lutheran slave.'

It was about sixteen months later that Drake, amongst the band of famous
captains gathered at Plymouth, watched the long-awaited Armada sailing
in a great crescent up the Channel. The English popular view of the
invasion is, perhaps, reflected in a ballad which was written soon after
the event. It is called 'Sir Francis Drake; or, Eighty-eight.'

'In eyghtye-eyght, ere I was borne,
As I can well remember,
In August was a fleet prepared,
The moneth before September.

'Spayne, with Biscayne, Portugall,
Toledo, and Granado,
All these did meet, and made a fleet,
And called it the Armado.

'When they had gott provision,
As mustard, pease, and bacon;
Some say two shipps were full of whipps,
But I thinke they were mistaken.

'There was a little man of Spaine
That shott well in a gunn-a--
Don Pedro bright, as good a knight
As the knight of the sunn-a.

'King Phillip made him Admiral,
And charged him not to stay-a--
But to destroy both man and boy,
And then to runn away-a.

'The King of Spayne did freet amayne,
And to doe yet more harme-a,
He sent along to make him strong
The famous Prince of Parma.

When they had sayl'd along the seas,
And anchored uppon Dover,
Our Englishmen did board them then,
And cast the Spaniards over.

'Oure Queene was then att Tilbury;
What could you more desire-a?
For whose sweete sake Sir Francis Drake
Did sett them all on fyre-a.

'But let them look about themselfe