482 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION, 
We have here a professed eulogy, high-flown even for those days 
of euphemistic hyperbole, in which the youthful writer not only 
equals Drake to Hercules, but cites Neptune, calls upon Jupiter to 
take his hero to heaven, and says—not that Drake gave the water 
to Plymouth, or that he originated the scheme, or paid for it, but 
that Her now bright face, once loathsomly defilde, 
He purg’d and clensed with a wholesome river. 
A statement which is nothing more than a florid and highly imagi- 
native rendering of the plain prose, ‘‘ Drake brought in the water” 
—conditions not stated. I call Fitz-Geffrey’s language highly 
imaginative because he endeavours to exalt Drake by magnifying 
his work and depreciating his surroundings, at the manifest expense 
of plain truth. 
The Meavy had left ‘his former place” and run an “uncouth 
race” to Warleigh long before Drake knew Buckland ; and whatever 
new and “quaint devise” was introduced was Lampen’s. Plymouth 
had flourished for centuries before Drake was born; and survived 
not only his death but that of her earlier Elizabethan patrons, the 
Hawkinses. Instead of being “great in nothing save renowne” it 
was one of the chief ports of the kingdom—populous and wealthy ; 
and Fitz-Geffrey’s ‘‘ loathsome defilement ” and “ unsavoury savour” 
are nothing more than random flights of poetic fervour. There is the 
fullest proof in the Corporate Accounts that the town was as well 
paved and drained and cleansed as any neighbouring “ city ;” and 
that its Corporation had rather advanced views of sanitary science. 
They understood quarantine perfectly well; and when the plague was 
imported and fostered by the soldiery, who at times were quartered 
here in immense numbers, they were enlightened enough to erect 
wooden hospitals at Batten and Lipson, and to take measures for 
isolation. The only difference the introduction of the water made 
in this relation was its being allowed to run through the gutters. 
To show what the Corporation really did do to keep the town 
“‘ sweet” I quote at intervals over a century or so a few illustrative 
entries out of many. They prove a continuous care exercised in 
many directions :— 
1494-5 A gutter made in “ Wympell strete ”— for 
Redying of y° same gutt' a man 1) dayes ve ai 
vycary is gardyne ; xv 
Money spent on the ‘‘ Putchyng of Teeyallee strata 
