In reply to a question as to the character which Bruce bore for uprightness, Captain Clarke replied: “As truthful and straightforward a man as ever I met in my life. We were as intimate as brothers; and two men can’t be together, shut up for nearly two years in the same ship, without getting to know whether they can trust one another’s word or not. He always spoke of the circumstance in terms of reverence, as of an incident that seemed to bring him nearer to God and to another world than anything that had ever happened to him in his life before. I’d stake my life upon it that he was speaking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, in the very extraordinary account which I have related to you just as he delivered it to me.”
Such is the story, and it is much to be regretted that there is no confirmation or other testimony from the two captains, or from any others who were in the vessel.
It is given by the Rev. Bourchier Wrey Savile, in his Apparitions: a Narrative of Facts. London, 1874.
GEORGE PEELE
Peele, a poet and dramatist, was a Devonshire man by birth, but of no family of consequence in the county, as the name does not once occur in the Heralds’ Visitations, either as a family entitled to bear arms or in the alliances of such. He became a student of Christ Church, Oxford, about the year 1573, where he studied to good effect and took his Master’s degree in 1579. Although he unquestionably studied, yet he also spent his spare time in revelry. He was always hard up for money, and was quite unscrupulous how he procured it. On one occasion, but later, when in middle life, he was riding to Oxford on a borrowed horse, and stayed the night at Wycombe, where the landlady of the inn was a great woman for herbs and nostrums of all sorts for the cure of every kind of disease. George Peele fell in with her humour, admired her prescriptions, and said:
“I am a doctor and surgeon myself, and am on my way to visit a gentleman of large estate in Warwickshire, who is fallen into a consumption.”
“Why—bless my heart,” exclaimed the hostess, “our squire here is very bad, and supposed to be in a consumption. The surgeons have given him up.”
Next morning at daybreak away runs the good-natured woman to the Hall, rouses the squire’s wife, and tells her that a notable London doctor is staying at her inn. The lady at once penned a note, entreating the learned leech to visit her husband; and the hostess carried this to Peele and urged him to visit the patient.