BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF SIR PHILIP BOWES VERE BROKE, BART. CAPTAIN IN THE ROYAL NAVY

Summary

—— Or do the gods inspire

This warmth, or make we gods of our desire?

A gen'rous ardour boils within my breast,

Eager of action, enemy to rest:

This urges me to fight, and fires my mind,

To leave a memorable name behind.”

Dryden's Virgil. Æneid. lib. ix.

ALTHOUGH ancestry alone, in the eye of the philosopher, can never dignify the man; as the concomitant of noble actions it does certainly add to the lustre they confer on the character of the individual that achieves them. Indeed, the contemplation of a long line of ancestry, rendered originally conspicuous, as it must have been, by qualities superlatively eminent in the parent stock, might be alone sufficient to induce in the various members of its dignified descent, an emulation worthy of the honours thus inherited. We shall, therefore, in our memoir of this gentleman, briefly state the antiquity of his family, as noticed in Sir Peter Leycester'sHistory of Cheshire :–

“This ancient family is descended from the Brookes of Leighton, in Nantwich hundred, in Cheshire, of which family I find one Adam, Dominus de Leighton, sub Henrico tertio, whose son was stiled William de la Brooke, of Leighton, (probably the William noticed by Camden, as master of Leighton, in 1249, being the 33d year of King Henry III.) and his son, Richard, stiled Ricardus de Doito, in an old deed in the 5th year of King Edward I. that is, Of the Brook, for Doet, in French, is a Brook in England; and under the said manor-house, in Leighton, a brook runneth, from whence their posterity assumed the surname of Del Brook. […]