Queen Elizabeth went in state to St. Paul’s Cathedral to offer up thanks to the Almighty for the safety of her Kingdom and herself, and caused a medal to be struck bearing on it a fleet scattered by a tempest and the words: 

   He blew with His winds and they were scattered.

Plymouth Hoe is an elevation between that town and the sea, and its history dates back to legendary ages, when Brutus and Corineus came to Albion with their Trojan warriors, and found the land inhabited by great giants, who terrified their men with their enormous size and horrid noises.  Still they were enabled to drive them away by hurling darts and spears into their bodies.  The leader of the giant race of Albion was Gogmagog, who was the biggest of them all, but they wounded him badly in the leg, as the story goes, and dragged him to Plymouth Hoe, where they treated him kindly and healed his wounds.  But the question arose who should be king, and it was decided to settle the matter by a wrestling match, the winner to be king.  The giants selected Gogmagog as their champion and the Trojans chose Corineus, brute strength and size on the one hand being matched by trained skill on the other.  On the day fixed for the combat the giants lined one side of the Hoe and the Trojans the other.  At length Corineus succeeded in forcing Gogmagog to the ground.  He fell on his back, the earth shaking with his weight and the air echoing with the noise of his mighty groan as the breath was forced from his body.  Then, after breathing a minute, Corineus rushed upon his fallen foe, dragged him with a great effort to the edge of the cliff, and pushed him over.  The giant fell on the rocks below, and his body was broken in pieces.

Michael Drayton, whose birthplace we had passed in the Midlands, wrote in his Polyolbion that there was a deadly combat between two giants “upon that lofty place the Hoe,” which took place after the arrival of the Trojans under Brutus of Troy, and that the figures of the two wrestlers, one bigger than the other, with clubs in their hands, were cut out in the turf on Plymouth Hoe, being renewed as time went on.  They vanished when the citadel was built by King Charles II, though in the digging of the foundations the great jaws and teeth of Gogmagog were found.

It was supposed that the last of the giants were named Gog and Magog, and were brought to London and chained in the palace of Brute, which stood on the site of the Guildhall there; their effigies were standing in the Guildhall in the reign of Henry V, but were destroyed in the Great Fire of London.  The present Gog and Magog in the Guildhall, 14 feet high, were carved by Richard Saunders in 1708, and are known as the “City Giants.”

[Illustration:  CITADEL GATE, PLYMOUTH.]

We had often heard and read about Brutus, one of those mysterious men whose history we could not fathom, for as far north as York we read in a book there that “Brutus settled in this country when the Prophet Eli governed Israel and the Ark was taken from the Philistines, about 1140 B.C., or a century and a half later than when David was singing Psalms in Jerusalem”; then the writer went on to say that a direct descendant of Brutus, King Ebrancus, anxious to find occupation for his twenty sons and thirty daughters, built two cities, one of which was York; so possibly the other city might have been London.