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