same time his wish to promote all manly and popular amusements by liberal grants and allowances to the masters of his hounds and hawks. There is, moreover, extant a mandate to all mayors and sheriffs, not to vex or molest John Brown, our mater-guider, and ruler of all our bears and apes to us appertaining.' Richard is commended by contemporaries for his encouragement of architecture; and the commendation is justified by a list of the structures which he completed or improved.

His love of music is inferred from the extreme measures he adopted for its gratification. Turner quotes a warrant 'empowering one of the gentlemen of his chapel to take and seize, for the king's use, all such singing men and children expert in the science of music, as he could find. and think able to do the king service, in all places in the kingdom, whether cathedrals, colleges, chapels, monasteries, or any other franchised places, except Windsor.' He was visited by minstrels from foreign countries, and gave annuities to several professors of the gentle science, 'and also,' adds Turner, 'perhaps for his fondness for their sonorous state music, to several trumpeters.' Mr. Jesse, in his Memoirs, will have it that Richard's nature was originally a compassionate one; and he appeals to the pensions considerately bestowed by him on the widows. of his enemies, Lady Hastings, Lady Rivers, Lady Oxford, and the Duchess of Buckingham.

The shortness of Richard's reign favours the idea that the nation, exasperated beyond endurance by his villanies,

rose and threw him off like an incubus. But nothing of the kind occurred. The people at large were too much inured to scenes of blood and acts of cruelty to be shocked by them. They cared little or nothing whether a few princes or lords more or less were put to death, so long as they were not fleeced by a tax-gatherer, or oppressed by a local tyrant; and Richard, like Cromwell at a later period, took good care that there should be no usurped or abused authority besides his own. He was not weighed in the balance, and found wanting, till two discontented nobles, the Stanleys, threw their whole weight into the opposing scale. The numerical inferiority of Richard's army is a conclusive proof that his cause was not a preeminently popular one.

The pair who contended on Bosworth Field for a kingdom are thus portrayed: Richard was better versed in arms; Henry was better served. Richard was brave; Henry a coward. Richard was about five feet four, rather runted, but only made crooked by his enemies, and wanted six weeks of thirty-three; Henry was twenty-seven, slender, and near five feet nine, with a saturnine countenance, yellow hair, and grey eyes.'

As to the person of Richard: the truth,' says Walpole, 'I take to have been this: Richard, who was slender, and not tall, had one shoulder a little higher than the other, a defect, by the magnifying-glasses of party, by distance of time, and by the amplification of tradition, easily swelled to a shocking deformity.' The impression left by a marked

1

personal peculiarity may be unconsciously heightened and transmitted till it becomes inextricably woven into the web of history.

The strongest argument in favour of Richard's personal appearance is that drawn from Dr. Shaw's address to the citizens of London preparatory to the usurpation: 'My Lord Protector, that very noble prince, the pattern of all heroic deeds, represents the very face and mind of the great Duke his father. His features are the same, and the very express likeness of that noble Duke.' At these words the Protector was to enter as if by chance; and although the point was missed by his non-appearance till a few minutes later, such a coup de theatre would hardly have been hazarded if Richard either presented no resemblance, or a miniature and caricature one, of his father.

Richard lost nothing of his vigilance or unrelenting sternness in his last hours. Going the rounds at Bosworth, he found a sentinel asleep, and stabbed him, with the remark: 'I found him asleep, and have left him as I found him.' 1

This narrative of the personal history of Richard III. is in the main condensed from a very able paper in the Edinburgh Review, No. cxv. 1862, with additions.

THE VALE OF WHITE HORSE.

A

S the railway traveller passes through the middle district of the Great Western line, he will,

doubtless, remark that the sky-line of the chalkdown, as seen from the valley, is continually broken by the elevation of some earthwork, carrying the mind's eye back to times of war and bloodshed, spoliation and conquest. This earthwork is known as Uffington Castle, and occupies the summit of White Horse Hill, 700 feet in diameter from east to west, and 500 feet from north to south. It is surrounded by a double vallum or embankment, the inner one high, and commanding an extensive view in every direction, the outer one slighter. On the steep escarpment of the hill, just below the entrenchment, our traveller will see the rude outline figure of a horse at full gallop, formed by removing the thin layer of turf and exposing the white surface beneath of the chalk. Hence the figure is called the White Horse. This is believed to have been cut as a memorial of the battle of Æscesdun, or Ash-tree Hill, in which the West Saxons, under Ethelred and Alfred in 871, defeated the Danes

with great slaughter on this spot. Be this as it may, the Horse is either of Saxon origin or of higher antiquity. Asser minutely describes how the Pagans (Danes) had got the higher ground, and how the battle was begun upon a spot where grew a single thorn-tree, which he himself had afterwards seen, the whole account having been given him by a faithful eye-witness. After a bloody and obstinate. dispute, one king and five counts were killed on the Pagan side, with many thousands of common men; and the rest were dispersed all over the wide plain of Ashdown, and pursued all that night and the next day as far as to their castle at Reading.'

The White Horse is a rude figure about 374 feet in length, and is said to cover an acre of ground. The face of the chalk-down is 893 feet above the sea-level; and when the afternoon sun shines upon the figure, it may be seen ten, twelve, and even fifteen miles distant; and from its immense size it forms a remarkable object. Wise, the antiquary, is in raptures with the skill displayed in the Horse, and in the admirable choice of a situation where it is little exposed to injury or decay. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood had an ancient custom of assembling to scour the Horse, i. e. to clear away the turf where it has encroached upon the outline of the Horse. On such occasions a rural festival was formerly held, and the people were regaled by the lord of the manor; but they do not appear to have observed that custom since 1780; it may possibly have dwindled to a common, purposeless