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do it right willingly. The king was a very long time at table; not for anything at all that he ate, but because he well knew that as soon as he had dined the duke would come for him, to carry him off or put him to death. They also let him remain a long time at table, because he was fasting. After he had dined, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl of Northumberland went in quest of the Duke of Lancaster. He quitted his men, who were drawn up in very fair array before the castle, and, with nine or eleven of the greatest lords who were with him, came to the king. At the entrance of the castle, Lancaster, the herald, brought us before the duke, kneeling on the ground; and the herald told him in the English language that we were of France, and that the king had sent us with King Richard into Ireland for recreation, and to see the country, and earnestly entreated him to save our lives. And then the duke made answer in French, My young men, fear not, neither be dismayed at anything that you behold, and keep close to me, and I will answer for your lives.' This reply was a most joyful hearing for us. After this the duke entered the castle, armed at all points, except his basinet, as you may see in this history. Then they made the king, who had dined in the donjon, come down to meet Duke Henry, who, as soon as he perceived him at a distance, bowed very low to the ground; and as they approached each other he bowed a second time, with his cap in his hand; and then the king took off his bonnet, and spake first in this manner: Fair cousin of Lancaster, you be right welcome.' Then Duke Henry replied, bowing very low to the ground, My lord, I am come sooner than you sent for me; the reason wherefore, I will tell you. The common report of your people is such, that you have, for the space of twenty or two-and-twenty years, governed them very badly and very rigorously, and in so much that they are not well contented therewith. But, if it please our Lord, I will help you to govern them better than they have been governed in time past.' King Richard then answered him, Fair cousin, since it pleaseth you, it pleaseth us well.' And be assured that these are the very words that they two spake together, without taking away or adding anything: for I heard and understood them very well. And the Earl of Salisbury also rehearsed them to me in French, and another aged knight, who was one of the council of Duke Henry. He told me, as we rode to Chester, that Merlin and Bede had, from the time in which they lived, prophesied of the taking and ruin of the king, and that if I were in

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his castle he should shew it me in form and manner as I had seen it come to pass, saying thus:

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'There shall be a king in Albion who shall reign for the space of twenty or two-and-twenty years in great honour and in great power, and shall be allied and united with those of Gaul; which king shall be undone in the parts of the north in a triangular place.' Thus the knight told me it was written in a book belonging to him. The triangular place he applied to the town of Conway, and for this he had a very good reason; for I can assure you that it is in a triangle, as though it had been so laid down by a true and exact measurement. In the said town of Conway was the king sufficiently undone; for the Earl of Northumberland drew him forth, as you have already heard, by the treaty which he made with him, and from that time he had no power. Thus the knight held this prophecy to be true, and attached thereunto great faith and credit; for such is the nature of them in their country, that they very thoroughly believe in prophecies, phantoms, and witchcraft, and have recourse to them right willingly. Yet in my opinion this is not right, but is a great want of faith.

"Thus, as you have heard, came Duke Henry to the castle, and spake unto the king, to the Bishop of Carlisle, and the two knights, Sir Stephen Scroope and Ferriby; howbeit unto the Earl of Salisbury he spake not at all, but sent word to him by a knight in this manner: Earl of Salisbury, be assured that no more than you deigned to speak to my lord the Duke of Lancaster, when he and you were in Paris at Christmas last past, will he speak unto you.' Then was the earl much abashed, and had great fear and dread at heart, for he saw plainly that the duke mortally hated him. The said Duke Henry called aloud with a stern and savage voice, 'Bring out the king's horses;' and then they brought him two little horses that were not worth forty francs: the king mounted one, and the Earl of Salisbury the other. Every one got on horseback, and we set out from the said castle of Flint about two hours after mid-day.

"In form and manner as you have heard, did Duke Henry take King Richard, his lord; and he brought him with great joy and satisfaction to Chester, which he had quitted in the morning. And know, that with great difficulty could the thunder of heaven have been heard for the loud bruit and sound of their instruments, horns, buisines, and trumpets, insomuch that they made all the sea-shore resound with them.

Thus the duke entered the city of Chester, to whom the common people paid great reverence, praising our lord, and shouting after their king, as it were in mockery. The duke led him straight to the castle, which is right fair and strong, and caused him to be lodged in the donjon. And then he gave him in keeping to the son of the Duke of Gloucester and the son of the Earl of Arundel, who hated him more than any one in the world, because King Richard had put their fathers to death. There he saw his brother the Duke of Exeter, but neither durst nor was able to speak to him. Presently after, the duke sat down to dinner, and made the Archbishop of Canterbury sit above him, and at some distance below him the Duke of Exeter, brother of King Richard, the Earl of Westmoreland, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Northumberland, and Sir Thomas Percy,-all these were seated at Duke Henry's table. And the king abode in the tower with his good friends the Earl of Salisbury, the Bishop of Carlisle, and the two knights; and from thenceforth we could never see him, unless it were abroad on the journey; and we were forbidden to speak any more to him, or to any of the others."

The interest of the Frenchman's narrative ends here, for he ceases to be an ear and eyewitness, and the melancholy journey of the king to London is described better by other Chroniclers. He returned to France without waiting the issue of the proceedings in Parliament which placed the crown of England on the head of Henry Bolingbroke. He gives a sequel and conclusion to the sad story, but merely on the report of "a clerk whom Duke Henry [Bolingbroke] had taken with him when he departed from Paris," and who had remained in London until some short time after the announcement of the death of King Richard. Upon that mysterious and much-debated fact, the authority of this French clerk does not appear to be entitled to much weight. His notion is that Richard died broken-hearted and self-starved in prison. His friend the knight is of a contrary opinion, believing that the king was yet alive and well, though most secretly immured in some prison or castle.

129.-APOPHTHEGMS.-IV.

KEATS.-A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr.

and myself in a lane near Highgate.

knew him, and spoke.

It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There is death in that hand," I said to , when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. -COLERIDGE. Table Talk.

to me.

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LEVELLING.- -"Sir, I would no more deprive a nobleman of his respect than of his money. I consider myself as acting a part in the great system of society, and I do to others as I would have them to do I would behave to a nobleman as I should expect he would behave to me, were I a nobleman and he Sam Johnson. Sir, there is one Mrs. Macaulay in this town, a great republican. One day, when I was at her house, I put on a very grave countenance, and said to her, Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us.' I thus, sir, showed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine. She has never liked me since. Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?" -BOSWELL. Life of Johnson.

QUACKERY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.-In the course of my life I have often pleased or entertained myself with observing the va rious and fantastical changes of the diseases generally complained of, and of the remedies in common vogue, which were like birds of passage, very much seen or heard of at one season, and disappeared at another, and commonly succeeded by some of a very different kind. When I was very young, nothing was so much feared or talked of as rickets among children, and consumption among young people of both sexes. After these the spleen came in play, and grew a formal disease: then the scurvy, which was the general complaint, and both were thought to appear in many various guises. After these, and for a time, nothing was so much talked of as the ferment of the blood, which passed for the cause of all sorts of ailments, that neither physicians nor patients knew well what to make of. And to all these succeeded vapours, which serve the same turn, and furnish occasion of complaint among persons

whose bodies or minds ail something, but they know not what, and among the Chinese would pass for mists of the mind or fumes of the brain, rather than indispositions of any other parts. Yet these employ our physicians, perhaps more than other diseases, who are fain to humour such patients in their fancies of being ill, and to prescribe some remedies for fear of losing their practice to others, that pretend more skill in finding out the cause of diseases or care in advising remedies, which neither they nor their patients find any effect of, besides some gains to one and amusement to the other. This, I suppose, may have contributed much to the mode of going to the waters, either cold or hot, upon so many occasions, or else upon none besides that of entertainment, and which commonly may have no other effect. And it is well if this be the worst of the frequent use of those waters, which, though commonly innocent, yet are sometimes dangerous, if the temper of the person or cause of the indisposition be unhappily mistaken, especially in people of age. As diseases have changed vogue, so have remedies in my time and observation. I remember at one time the taking of tobacco, at another the drinking of warm beer, proved for universal remedies; then swallowing of pebble stones, in imitation of falconers curing hawks. One doctor pretended to help all heats and fevers by drinking as much cold spring water as the patient could bear; at another time, swallowing a spoonful of powder of sea-biscuit after meals was infallible for all indigestions, and so preventing diseases. Then coffee and tea began their successive reigns. The infusion or powder of steel have had their turns, and certain drops of several names and compositions; but none that I find have established their authority, either long or generally, by any constant and sensible successes of their reign, but have rather passed like a mode, which every one is apt to follow, and finds the most convenient or graceful while it lasts, and begins to dislike in both those respects when it goes out of fashion.-SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE's Miscellanea.

COLERIDGE. To leave the every-day circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely-the rest never-break through the spell of personality; where anecdote reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual phenomena by the application of eternal and ever-ruling principles, is unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more; to leave this species of converse, if converse it de

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