John Brock, Esq., born January 24, 1729, second son of the above-named William, had by his wife, Elizabeth De Lisle, a very numerous family of ten sons and four daughters, of whom eight sons and two daughters reached maturity.  He died in June, 1777, at Dinan, in Brittany, whither he had gone for the benefit of the waters, at the early age of forty-eight years.[6] In his youth he was a midshipman in the navy, and in that capacity had made a voyage to India, which was then considered a great undertaking.  As he was possessed of much activity of mind and considerable talent, his death was an irreparable loss to his children, who were of an age to require all the care and counsels of a father; the eldest, John, having only completed his seventeenth year.  They were left in independent, if not in affluent, circumstances; but the fond indulgence of a widowed mother, who could deny them no enjoyment, tended, notwithstanding their long minority, to diminish their patrimony.

Isaac Brock, the eighth son, was born in the parish of St. Peter-Port, Guernsey, on the 6th of October, 1769, the year which gave birth to Napoleon and Wellington.  In his boyhood he was, like his brothers, unusually tall, robust, and precocious, and, with an appearance much beyond his age, remarkable chiefly for extreme gentleness.  In his eleventh year he was sent to school at Southampton, and his education was concluded by his being placed for a twelvemonth under a French Protestant clergyman at Rotterdam, for the purpose of learning the French language.  His eldest brother, John, a lieutenant in the 8th, the King’s, regiment, being promoted to a company by purchase, Isaac succeeded, also by purchase, to the ensigncy which consequently became vacant in that regiment, and to which he was appointed on the 2d of March, 1785, soon after he had completed his fifteenth year.  He joined in England, and was quartered there in different places for a few years.  Having entered the army at so early an age, he happily felt sensible of his deficiencies of education, and for a long period he devoted his leisure mornings to study, locking the door of his room until one o’clock, to prevent intrusion.  In 1790 he was promoted to a lieutenantcy, and was quartered in Guernsey and Jersey.  At the close of that year he obtained an independent company, by raising the requisite number of men to complete it, and was put on half pay.  He exchanged soon after, by giving the difference, into the 49th, which regiment he joined at Barbadoes, in 1791, and he remained doing duty there, and afterwards at Jamaica, until 1793, when he was compelled to return very suddenly to England on sick leave, having nearly fallen a victim to the pestilential effects of the climate, and an immediate embarkation being pronounced his only chance of recovery.  His first cousin, Lieutenant Henry Brock, of the 13th foot, who was ill at the same time at Jamaica, died of the fever; and the survivor always thought that