Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 1.djvu/281

 MILES STANDISH 189 time. His expression was varied and animated, and his powers of conversation remarkable. His person was dignified and handsome, and he excelled in bodily accomplishments and martial exercises. He was very fond of paintings, and of music ; and, in literature as in art, he possessed a cultivated and correct taste. He was one of those rare men who seem qualified to excel in all pursuits alike ; and his talents were set off by an extraordinary laboriousness and capacity of application. As a navigator, soldier, statesman, and historian, his name is inti- mately and honorably linked with one of the most brilliant periods of British history. MILES STANDISH* BY ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS (1584-1656) THREE hundred years ago the house of Standish was a notable one in England. The family had numerous possessions ; their Lancashire estate of Duxbury Hall, in the shadow of Riv- ington Pike and the Pennine Hills, wae pleasant and extensive, and there they had lived for generations, as there they live to-day. Of this Lancashire home was that John Standish, " squire to the king," who killed Wat Tyler, the agitator, on that memorable June day of 1381 when the boy-king of Eng- land, Richard the Second, so pluckily faced his rebellious subjects on the plain of Smithfield ; of it was that Sir John Standish who fought under the leopard-banner of King Edward at the stone mill of Crecy ; and of it was that gallant soldier Miles Standish, the Puri- tan captain, the first commissioned military officer of New England, famous in American history, song, and story, as the stay and bulwark of the Pilgrims of Plymouth in their days of struggle and beginning. Miles Standish (or Myles, as the old spelling has it) was born in Lancashire, presumably in the family manor house of Duxbury Hall, in the year 1584. The story of his life is simple. The absolute facts upon which it is based are meagre, but enough is known to warrant the assertion that Miles Standish was heir to the name and estates of the Standishes of Lancashire, from which, by some device not on record, he was, as he sturdily maintained in his will, " surreptitiously " defrauded. RELICS OF MILES STANDISH.
 * Copyright. 1894, by Selmar Hess.