general esteem which he had deserved by his fidelity to all the duties of the man and the citizen.  Though so far removed from the active centres of life, he kept touch with it by the variety of his interests in all useful and benevolent undertakings, to which an ample fortune allowed him freely to contribute.  “The hopes entertained of his assistance and sympathy,” observes his biographer, “were never disappointed.”  Among naval biographies, there is none that presents a more pleasing picture of genial and dignified enjoyment of well-earned repose.  In 1831, upon the accession of William IV., the Sailor King, the long-coveted peerage was at last bestowed.  Lord de Saumarez died on the 9th of October, 1836, in his eightieth year.

PELLEW

1757-1833

Like the English tongue itself, the names of British seamen show the composite origin of their nation.  As the Danes after the day of Copenhagen, to them both glorious and disastrous, claimed that in Nelson they had been vanquished by a man of their own blood, descended from their Viking forefathers; as Collingwood and Troubridge indicate the English descent of the two closest associates of the victor of Trafalgar; so Saumarez and the hero of this sketch, whose family name was Pellew, represent that conquering Norman race which from the shores of the Northern ocean carried terror along the coasts of Europe and the Mediterranean, and as far inland as their light keels could enter.  After the great wars of the French Revolution and the Battle of Algiers, when Lord Exmouth had won his renown and his position had been attained, kinship with him was claimed by a family still residing in Normandy, where the name was spelled “Pelleu.”  Proof of common origin was offered, not only in the name, but also in the coat of arms.  In England, the Pellew family was settled in the extreme southwest, in Cornwall and Devonshire, counties whose nearness to the great Atlantic made them the source of so much of the maritime enterprise that marked the reign of Elizabeth.  Lord Exmouth’s grandfather was a man of wealth; but, as he left many children, the juniors had to shift for themselves, and the youngest son, Samuel Pellew, the father of the admiral, at the time of the latter’s birth commanded a post-office packet on the Dover station.  He accordingly made the town of that name the home of his wife and children; and there Edward, the second of his four sons, was born, April 19, 1757.  Their mother was the daughter of a Jacobite gentleman, who had been out for the Pretender in 1715,—­a fact which probably emphasized the strong Hanoverian sympathies of Samuel Pellew, whose habit was to make his children, every Sunday, drink King George’s health upon their knees.