Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

SIR GUY OF WARWICK,

AND WHAT BEFELL HIM.

“His desires

Are higher than his state, and his deserts

Not much short of the most he can desire.”

Chapman’s Byron’s Conspiracy.

The Christian name of Guy was once an exceedingly popular name in the county of York. I have never heard a reason assigned for this, but I think it may have originated in admiration of the deeds and the man whose appellation and reputation have survived to our times. I do not allude to Guy Faux; that young gentleman was the Father of Perverts, but by no means the first of the Guys.

The “Master Guy” of whom I am treating here, or, rather, about to treat, was a youth whose family originally came from Northumberland. That family was, in one sense, more noble than the imperial family of Muscovy, for its members boasted not only of good principles, but of sound teeth.

The teeth and principles of the Romanoffs are known to be in a distressing state of dilapidation.

Well; these Northumbrian Guys having lived extremely fast, and being compelled to compound with their creditors, by plundering the latter, and paying them zero in the pound, migrated southward, and finally settled in Warwickshire. Now, the head of the house had a considerable share of common sense about him, and after much suffering in a state of shabby gentility, he not only sent his daughters out to earn their own livelihood, but, to the intense disgust of his spouse, hired himself as steward to that noble gentleman the Earl of Warwick. “My blood is as good as ever it was,” said he to the fine lady his wife. “It is the blood of an upper servant,” cried she, “and my father’s daughter is the spouse of a flunkey.”

The husband was not discouraged; and he not only opened his office in his patron’s castle but he took his only son with him, and made him his first clerk. This son’s name was Guy; and he was rather given to bird-catching, hare-snaring, and “gentism” generally. He had been a precocious youth from some months previous to his birth, and had given his lady-mother such horrid annoyance, that she was always dreaming of battles, fiery-cars, strong-smelling dragons, and the wrathful Mars. “Well,” she used to remark to her female friends, while the gentlemen were over their wine, “I expect that this boy” (she had made up her mind to that) “will make a noise in the world, draw bills upon his father, and be the terror of maid-servants. Why, do you know——” and here she became confidential, and I do not feel authorized to repeat what she then communicated.

But Master Guy, the “little stranger” alluded to, proved better than was expected. He might have been considerably worse, and yet would not have been so bad as maternal prophecy had depicted him. At eight years ... but I hear you say, “When did all this occur?” Well, it was in a November’s “Morning Post,” that announcement was made of the birth; and as to the year, Master Guy has given it himself in the old metrical romance,

“Two hundred and twenty years and odd,

After our Savior Christ his birth,

When King Athelstan wore the crown,

I livéd here upon the earth.”

At eight years old, I was about to remark, young Guy was the most insufferable puppy of his district. He won all the prizes for athletic sports; and by the time he was sixteen there was not a man in all England who dared accept his challenge to wrestle with both arms, against him using only one.

It was at this time that he kept his father’s books and a leash of hounds, with the latter of which he performed such extraordinary feats, that the Earl of Warwick invited him from the steward’s room to his own table; where Guy’s father changed his plate, and Master Guy twitched him by the beard as he did it.

At the head of the earl’s table sat his daughter “Phillis the Fair,” a lady who, like her namesake in the song, was “sometimes forward, sometimes coy,” and altogether so sweetly smiling and so beguiling, that when the earl asked Guy if he would not come and hunt (the dinner was at 10 A. M.), Guy answered, as the Frenchman did who could not bear the sport, with a Merci, j’ai été! and affecting an iliac seizure, hinted at the necessity of staying at home.

The youth forthwith was carried to bed. Phillis sent him a posset, the earl sent him his own physician; and this learned gentleman, after much perplexity veiled beneath the most affable and confident humbug, wrote a prescription which, if it could do the patient no good would do him no harm. He was a most skilful man, and his patients almost invariably recovered under this treatment. He occasionally sacrificed one or two when a consultation was held, and he was called upon to prescribe secundum artem; but he compensated for this professional slaying by, in other cases, leaving matters to Nature, who was the active partner in his firm, and of whose success he was not in the least degree jealous. So, when he had written the prescription, Master Guy fell a discoursing of the passion of love, and that with a completeness and a variety of illustration as though he were the author of the chapter on that subject in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” The doctor heard him to the end, gently rubbing one side of his nose the while with the index-finger of his right hand; and when his patient had concluded, the medical gentleman smiled, hummed “Phillis is my only joy,” and left the room with his head nodding like a Chinese Mandarin’s.

By this time the four o’clock sun was making green and gold pillars of the trees in the neighboring wood, and Guy got up, looked at the falling leaves, and thought of the autumn of his hopes. He whistled “Down, derry, down,” with a marked emphasis on the down; but suddenly his hopes again sprang up, as he beheld Phillis among her flower-beds, engaged in the healthful occupation which a sublime poet has given to the heroine whom he names, and whose action he describes, when he tells us that

“Miss Dinah was a-walking in her garding one day.”

Guy trussed his points, pulled up his hose, set his bonnet smartly on his head, clapped a bodkin on his thigh, and then walked into the garden with the air of the once young D’Egville in a ballet, looking after a nymph—which indeed was a pursuit he was much given to when he was old D’Egville, and could no longer bound through his ballets, because he was stiff in the joints.

Guy, of course, went down on one knee, and at once plunged into the most fiery style of declaration, but Phillis had not read the Mrs. Chapone of that day for nothing. She brought him back to prose and propriety, and then the two started afresh, and they did talk! Guy felt a little “streaked” at first, but he soon recovered his self-possession, and it would have been edifying for the young mind to have heard how these two pretty things spoke to, and answered each other in moral maxims stolen from the top pages of their copy-books. They poured them out by the score, and the proverbial philosophy they enunciated was really the origin of the book so named by Martin Tupper. He took it all from Phillis and Guy, whose descendants, of the last name, were so famous for their school-books. This I expect Mr. Tupper will (not) mention in his next edition.

After much profitable interchange of this sort of article, the lady gently hinted that Master Guy was not indifferent to her, but that he was of inferior birth, yet of qualities that made him equal with her; adding, that hitherto he had done little but kill other people’s game, whereas there were nobler deeds to be accomplished. And then she bade him go in search of perilous adventures, winding up with the toast and sentiment, “Master Guy, eagles do not care to catch flies.”

Reader, if you have ever seen the prince of pantomimists, Mr. Payne, tear the hair of his theatrical wig in a fit of amorous despair, you may have some idea as to the intensity with which Master Guy illustrated his own desperation. He stamped the ground with such energy that all the hitherto quiet aspens fell a-shaking, and their descendants have ever since maintained the same fashion. Phillis fell a-crying at this demonstration, and softened considerably. After a lapse of five minutes, she had blushingly directed Master Guy to “speak to papa.”

Now, of all horrible interviews, this perhaps is the most horrible. Nelson used to say that there was only one thing on earth which he dreaded, and that was dining with a mayor and corporation. Doubtless it is dreadful, but what is it compared with looking a grave man in the face, who has no sentiment into him, and whose first remark is sure to be, “Well, sir, be good enough to tell me—what can you settle on my daughter? What can you do to secure her happiness?”

“Well,” said Guy, in reply to this stereotyped remark, “I can kill the Dun cow on the heath. She has killed many herself who’ve tried the trick on her; and last night she devoured crops of clover, and twice as many fields of barley on your lordship’s estate.”

“First kill the cow, and then——,” said the earl with a smile; and Shakespeare had the echo of this speech in his ear, when he began the fifth act of his Othello. Now Guy was not easily daunted. If I cared to make a pun, I might easily have said “cowed,” but in a grave and edifying narrative this loose method of writing would be extremely improper. Guy, then, was not a coward—nay, nothing is hidden under the epithet. He tossed a little in bed that night as he thought the matter over, and the next morning made sheets of paper as crumpled as the cow’s horns, as he rejected the plans of assault he had designed upon them, and sat uncertain as to what he should do in behoof of his own fortune. He at length determined to go and visit the terrible animal “incognito.” It is the very word used by one of the biographers of Guy, an anonymous Northumbrian, who published the life on a broad sheet, with a picture of Master Guy which might have frightened the cow, and which is infinitely more ugly. Neither the black-letter poem, the old play, nor the pamphlets or ballads, use the term incognito, but all declare that Guy proceeded with much caution, and a steel cuirass over his jerkin. I mention these things, because without correctness my narrative would be worthless. I am not imaginative, and would not embroider a plain suit of fact upon any account.

Guy’s carefulness is to be proved. Here was a cow that had been more destructive than ever Red Riding Hood’s Wolf was—that Count Wolf, who used to snap up young maidens, and lived as careless of respectability as was to be expected of a man once attached to a “marching regiment,” and who turned monk. The cow was twelve feet high, from the hoof to the shoulder, and eighteen feet long, from the neck to the root of the tail. All the dragons ever heard of had never been guilty of such devastation to life and property as this terrible cow. Guy looked at her and did not like her. The cow detected him and rushed at her prey. Guy was active, attacked her in front and rear, as the allies did the forts of Bomarsund; very considerably confused her by burying his battle-axe in her skull; hung on by her tail as she attempted to fly; and finally gave her the coup de grace by passing his rapier rapidly and repeatedly through her especially vulnerable point behind the ear. In proof of the fact, the scene of the conflict still bears the name of Dunsmore Heath, and that is a wider basis of proof than many “facts” stand upon, to which we are required by plodding teachers to give assent.

Besides, there is a rib of this very cow exhibited at Bristol. To be sure it is not a rib now of a cow, but out of reverence to the antiquity of the assertion which allegedly makes it so, I think we are bound to believe what is thus advanced. Not that I do myself, but that is of no consequence. I have a strong idea that the cow was not a cow, but a countess (not a Countess Cowper), who made war in her own right, lived a disreputable life, was as destructive to wealthy young lords as a Lorette, and won whole estates by cheating at écarté. Guy took a hand, and beat her.

Poor Master Guy, he was as hardly used as ever Jacob was, and much he meditated thereupon in the fields at eventide. The stern earl would by no means give his consent to the marriage of his daughter with the young champion, until the latter had performed some doughtier deeds than this. The boy (he was still in his teens) took heart of grace, divided a crooked sixpence with Phillis, and straightway sailed for Normandy, where he arrived, after meeting as many thieves by the way as if he had walked about for a month in the streets of Dover. But Master Guy killed all he met; there is a foolish judicial, not to say social, prejudice against our doing the same with the bandits of Dover. I can not conjecture why; perhaps they have a privilege under some of the city companies, whereby they are constituted the legal skinners of all sojourners among them, carrying filthy lucre.

Guy met in Normandy with the last person he could have expected to fall in with—no other than the Emperor of Almayne, a marvellously ubiquitous person to be met with in legends, and frequently encountered in the seaports of inland towns. The historians are here a little at issue. One says that Master Guy having found a certain Dorinda tied to the stake, and awaiting a champion who would stake his own life for her rescue, inquired the “antecedents” of the position. Dorinda, it appears, had been as rudely used as young lady possibly could be, “by the Duke of Blois, his son,” and the duke was so enraged at Dorinda’s charge against his favorite Otto, that he condemned her to be burned alive, unless a champion appeared in time to rescue her by defeating the aforesaid Otto in single combat. Guy, of course, transacted the little business successfully; spoiled Otto’s beauty by slashing his nose; and so enchanted Dorinda, that she never accused her champion of doing aught displeasing to her.

Anxious as I am touching the veracity of this narrative, I have recorded what biographers state, though not in their own words. But I must add, that in some of the histories this episode about Dorinda is altogether omitted, and we only hear of Master Guy appearing in panoply at a tournament given by the Emperor of Allemagne, in Normandy—which is much the same, gentle reader, as if I were, at your cost, to give a concert and ball, with a supper from Farrance’s, and all, not in my house, but in yours. Nevertheless, in Normandy the tournament was held, and the paternal Emperor of Allemagne, having then a daughter, Blanche, of whom he wished to get rid, he set her up as the prize of the conquering knight in the tournament.

I think I hear you remark something as to the heathenness of the custom. But it is a custom sacred to these times; and our neighbors (for of course neither you nor I could condescend to such manners) get up evening tournaments of whist, quadrilles, and a variety of singing—of every variety but the good and intelligible, and at these modern tournaments given for the express purpose which that respectable old gentleman, the Emperor of Allemagne, had in view when he opened his lists; the “girls” are the prizes of the carpet-knights. So gentlemen, faites votre jeu, as the philosopher who presided at Frescati’s used to say—faites votre jeu, Messieurs; and go in and win. Perhaps if you read Cowper, you may be the better armed against loss in such a conflict.

I need not say that Master Guy’s good sword, which gleamed like lightning in the arena, and rained blows faster than ever Mr. Blanchard rained them, in terrific Coburg combats, upon the vulnerable crest of Mr. Bradley—won for him the peerless prize—to say nothing of a dog and a falcon thrown in. Master Guy rather ungallantly declined having the lady, though her father would have given him carte blanche; he looked at her, muttered her name, and then murmured, “Blanche, as thou art, yet art thou black-a-moor, compared with my Phillis;”—and with this unchivalric avowal, for it was a part of chivalry to say a thing and think another, he returned to England, carrying with him the “Spaniel King’s Charls,” as French authors write it, and the falcon, with a ring and a perch, like a huge parroquet.

Master Guy entered Warwick in a “brougham,” as we now might say, and sorely was he put to it with the uneasy bird. At every lurch of the vehicle, out flapped the wings, elongated was the neck, and Master Guy had to play at “dodge” with the falcon, who was intent upon darting his terrific beak into the cavalier’s nose. At length, however, the castle was safely reached; the presents were deposited at the feet of Phillis the Fair, and Guy hoped, like the Peri, and also like that gentle spirit to be disappointed, that the gates of paradise were about to open. But not so, Phillis warmly praised his little regard for that pert minx, Blanche, or Blanc d’Espagne, as she wickedly added; and she patted the spaniel, and offered sugar to the falcon; and, after the dinner to which Guy was invited, she intimated in whispers, that they were both “too young as yet” (not that she believed so), and that more deeds must be done by Guy, ere the lawyers would be summoned by her papa to achieve some of their own.

The youthful Guy went forth “reluctant but resolved,” and he would have sung as he went along,

“Elle a quinze ans, moi j’en ai seize,”

of Sedaine and Grétry, only neither poet nor composer, nor the opera of Richard Cœur de Lion, had yet appeared to gladden heart and ear. But the sentiment was there, and perhaps Sedaine knew of it when he penned the words. However this may be, Master Guy, though soft of heart, was not so of arm, for on this present cause of errantry he enacted such deeds that their very enumeration makes one breathless. His single sword cleared whole forests of hordes of brigands, through whose sides his trenchant blade passed as easily as the sabre, when held by Corporal Sutton, through a dead sheep. Our hero was by no means particular as to what he did, provided he was doing something; nor what cause he fought for, provided there were a cause and a fight. Thus we find him aiding the Duke of Louvain against his old friend the Emperor of Allemagne. He led the Duke’s forces, slew thousands upon thousands of the enemy, and, as though he had the luck of a modern Muscovite army, did not lose more than “one man,” with slight damage to the helmet of a second.

Master Guy, not yet twenty, surpassed the man whom Mr. Thiers calls “ce pur Anglais,” Mr. Pitt, for he became a prime minister ere he had attained his majority. In that capacity he negotiated a peace for the Duke with the Emperor. The two potentates were so satisfied with the negotiator, that out of compliment they offered him the command of their united fleet against the Pagan Soldan of Byzantium. They did not at all expect that he would accept it; but then they were not aware that Master Guy had much of the spirit which Sidney Smith, in after-years, discerned in Lord John Russell—and the enterprising Guy accepted the command of the entire fleet, with quite an entire confidence.

He did therewith, if chroniclers are to be credited, more than we might reasonably expect from Lord John Russell, were that statesman to be in command of a Channel squadron. Having swept the sea, he rather prematurely, if dates are to be respected, nearly annihilated Mohammedanism—and he was as invincible and victorious against every kind of Pagan. It was in the East that he overthrew in single combat, the giants Colbron and his brother Mongadora. He was resting after this contest, and leaning like the well-breathed Hotspur, upon his sword, at the entrance to his tent, when the Turkish governor Esdalante, approaching him, politely begged that he might take his head, as he had promised the same to an Osmanlee lady, who was in a condition of health which might be imperilled by refusal. Master Guy as politely bade him take it if he could, and therewith, they went at it “like French falconers,” and Guy took off the head of his opponent instead of losing his own. This little matter being settled, Guy challenged the infidel Soldan himself, putting Christianity against Islamism, on the issue, and thus professing to decide questions of faith as Galerius did when he left Olympus and Calvary to depend upon a vote of the Roman senate. Master Guy, being thrice armed by the justness of his quarrel, subdued the infidel Soldan, but the latter, to show, as we are told, his insuperable hatred for Christianity, took handfuls of his own blood, and cast it in the face of his conqueror—and no doubt here, the victor had in his mind the true story of Julian insulting “the Galilæan.” We thus see how history is made to contribute to legend.

And now the appetite of the errant lover grew by what it fed upon. He mixed himself up in every quarrel, and could not see a lion and a dragon quietly settling their disputes in a wood, by dint of claws, without striking in for the lion, slaying his foe, and receiving with complacency the acknowledgments of the nobler beast.

He achieved something more useful when he met Lord Terry in a wood, looking for his wife who had been carried off by a score of ravishers. While the noble lord sat down on a mossy bank, like a gentleman in a melodrama, Guy rescued his wife in his presence, and slew all the ravishers, “in funeral order,” the youngest first. He subsequently stood godfather to his friend Terry’s child, and as I am fond of historical parallels, I may notice that Sir Walter Scott performed the same office for a Terry, who if he was not a lord, often represented them, to say nothing of monarchs and other characters.

Master Guy’s return to England was a little retarded by another characteristic adventure. As he was passing through Louvain, he found Duke Otto besieging his father in his own castle—“governor” of the castle and the Duke. Now nothing shocked Master Guy so much as filial ingratitude, and despite all that Otto could urge about niggardly allowance, losses at play, debts of honor, and the parsimony of the “governor,” our champion made common cause with the “indignant parent,” and not only mortally wounded Otto, but, before the latter died, Guy brought him to a “sense of his situation,” and Otto died in a happy frame of mind, leaving all his debts to his father. The legacy was by way of a “souvenir,” and certainly the governor never forgot it. As for Guy, he killed the famous boar of Louvain, before he departed for England, and as he drew his sword from the animal’s flank, he remarked, there lies a greater boar, and not a less beast than Otto himself. However, he took the head and hams with him, for Phillis was fond of both; and as she was wont to say, if there was anything that could seduce her, it was brawn!

When Master Guy stepped ashore at Harwich, where that amphibious town now lies soaking, deputations from all quarters were awaiting him, to ask his succor against some terrible dragon in the north that was laying waste all the land, and laying hold of all the waists which the men there wished to enclose. King Athelstan was then at York hoping to terrify the indomitable beast by power of an army, which in combat with the noxious creature made as long a tail, in retreat, as the dragon itself.

Now whatever this nuisance was which so terribly plagued the good folks in the North, whether a dragon with a tongue thirty feet long, or anything else equally hard to imagine, it is matter of fact that our Master Guy assuredly got the better of it. On his return he met an ovation in York; Athelstan entertained him at a banquet, covered him with honor, endowed him with a good round sum, and thus all the newborn male children in the county became Guys. At least two thirds of them received the popular name, and for many centuries it remained in favor, until disgrace was brought upon it by the York proctor’s son, whose effigy still glides through our streets on each recurring 5th of November.

I will not pause on this matter. I will only add that the Earl of Warwick, finding Guy a man whom the King delighted to honor, accepted him for a son-in-law; and then, ever wise, and civil, and proper, he discreetly died. The King made Guy Earl of Warwick, in his place, and our hero being now a married man, he of course ceased to be Master Guy.

And here I might end my legend, but that it has a moral in it Guy did a foolish but a common thing, he launched out into extravagant expenses, and, suddenly, he found himself sick, sad, and insolvent. Whether, therewith, his wife was soured, creditors troublesome, and bailiffs presuming, it is hard to say. One thing, however, is certain, that to save himself from all three, Earl Guy did what nobles often do now, in the same predicament, “went abroad.” Guy, however, travelled in primitive style. He went on foot, and made his inn o’nights in church-yards, where he colloquized with the skulls after the fashion of Hamlet with the skull of “poor Yorick.” He had given out that he was going to Jerusalem, but hearing that the Danes were besieging Athelstan at Winchester, he went thither, and, in modest disguise, routed them with his own unaided hand. Among his opponents, he met with the giant Colbron whom he had previously slain in Orient lands, and the two fought their battles o’er again, and with such exactly similar results as to remind one of the peculiar philosophy of Mr. Boatswain Cheeks.

This appearance of Colbron in two places is a fine illustration of the “myth,” and I mention it expressly for the benefit of the next edition of the Right Reverend Doctor Whateley’s “Historical Fallacies.” But to resume.

Guy, imparting a confidential statement of his identity and intentions to the King, left him, to take up his abode in a cave, in a cliff, near his residence; and at the gates of his own castle he received, in the guise of a mendicant, alms of money and bread, from the hands of his wife. I strongly suspect that the foundation of this section of our legend rests upon the probable fact that Phillis was of that quality which is said to belong to gray mares; and that she led Guy a life which made him a miserable Guy indeed; and that the poor henpecked man took to bad company abroad, and met with small allowance of everything but reproach at home And so he “died.”

A dramatic author of Charles I.’s reign, has, however, resuscitated him in “A Tragical History of Guy, Earl of Warwick,” enacted several times in presence of that monarch, and professedly written by a certain “B. J.,” whom I do not at all suspect of being Ben Jonson. The low comedy portion of this tragic drama is of the filthiest sort, dealing in phrases and figures which I can hardly conceive would now be tolerated in the lowest den of St. Giles’s, certainly not out of it. If Charles heard this given more than once, as the titlepage intimates, “more shame for him.” If his Queen was present, she haply may not have understood the verba ad summam caveam spectantia, and if a daughter could have been at the royal entertainment, why then the very idea revolts one, and pity is almost lost in indignation. That the author himself thought well of the piece, which he printed in 1661, is proved by the defiant epigraph which says:—

“Carpere vel noli nostra vel ede tua.”

I must not devote much space to a retrospective review of this piece, particularly as the action begins after Guy has ceased to be “Master,” and when, on his announcement of going to Jerusalem (perhaps to the Jews to do a little business in bills), Phillis makes some matronly remarks in a prospective sense, and a liberty of illustration which would horrify a monthly nurse.

However, Guy goes forth and meets with a giant so huge, that his squire Sparrow says it required four-and-twenty men to throw mustard in his mouth when he dined. From such giants, Heaven protects the errant Guy, and with a troop of fairies, wafts him to Jerusalem. Here he finds Shamurath of Babylon assaulting the city, but Guy heaps miracle on miracle of valor, and produces such astounding results that Shamurath, who is a spectator of the deeds and the doer; inquires, with a suspicion of Connaught in the accent of the inquiry, “What divil or man is this?”

The infidel is more astonished than ever when Guy, after defeating him, takes him into controversy, and laying hold of him as Dr. Gumming does of Romanism, so buffets his belief that, the soldier, fairly out of breath and argument, gives in, and declares himself a Christian, on conviction.

During one-and-twenty years, Guy has a restless life through the five acts of this edifying tragedy, and when he is seen again in England, overcoming the Danes, he intimates to Athelstan that he has six years more to pass in disguise, ere a vow, of which we have before heard nothing, will be fulfilled. Athelstan receives all that is said, in confidence; and promises affably, “upon my word,” not to betray the secret. Guy is glad to hear that Phillis is “pretty well;” and then he takes up his residence as I have before told, according to the legend. He and an Angel occasionally have a little abstruse disquisition; but the most telling scene is doubtless where the bread is distributed to the beggars, by Phillis. Guy is here disguised as a palmer, and Phillis inquires if he knew the great Earl, to which Guy answers, with a wink of the eye, that he and the Earl had often drank at the same crystal spring. But Phillis is too dull, or too melancholy to trace her way through so sorry a joke.

And now, just as the hour of completion of the vowed time of his disguise, Guy takes to dying, and in that state he is found by Rainhorn, the son who knows him not. He sends a token by the young fellow to Phillis, who begins to suspect that the palmer who used to be so particular in asking for “brown bread” at her gate, must be the “Master Guy” of the days of sunny youth, short kirtles, and long love-making. Mother and son haste to the spot, but the vital spark has fled. Phillis exclaims, with much composed thought, not unnatural in a woman whose husband has been seven-and-twenty years away from home, and whose memory is good: “If it be he, he has a mould-wart underneath his ear” to which the son as composedly remarks, “View him, good mother, satisfy your mind.” Thereupon the proper identification of the “party” is established; and the widow is preparing to administer, without will annexed, when Rainhorn bids her banish sorrow, as the King is coming. The son evidently thinks the honor of a living king should drown sorrow for a deceased parent; just as a Roman family that can boast of a Pope in it, does not put on mourning even when that Pope dies; the having had him, being considered a joy that no grief should diminish.

Athelstan is evidently a King of Cockayne, for he affably expresses surprise at the old traveller’s death, seeing, says his Majesty, that “I had appointed for to meet Sir Guy” to which the son, who has now succeeded to the estate, replies, in the spirit of an heir who has been waiting long for an inheritance:—“that the death has happened, and can not now be helped.”

But the most remarkable matter in this tragedy is that uttered by Time, who plays prologue, epilogue, and interlude between the acts. Whatever Charles may have thought of the piece, he was doubtless well-pleased with Time, who addresses the audience in verse, giving a political turn to the lesson on the stage. I dare say the following lines were loudly applauded, if not by the king, by the gallants, courtiers, and cavaliers generally:—

“In Holy Land abroad Guy’s spirits roam,

And not in deans and chapters’ lands at home.

His sacred fury menaceth that nation,

Which held Judea under sequestration.

He doth not strike at surplices and tippets,

To bring an olio in of sects and sippets;

But deals his warlike and death-doing blows

Against his Saviour’s and his sov’reign’s foes.”

How the Royalist throats must have roared applause, and warrantably too, at these genial lines; and how must the churchmen in the pit have stamped with delight when Time subsequently assured them that Guy took all his Babylonian prisoners to Jerusalem, and had them probably christened by episcopally-ordained ministers! If the house did not ring with the cheers of the Church-and-King audience there, why they were unworthy of the instruction filtered through legend and tragedy.

Such is the story of “Master Guy;” a story whose incidents have doubtless meaning in them, but which were never turned to more practical purpose than when they were employed to support a tottering altar and a fallen throne. Reader, let us drink to the immortal memory of Master Guy; and having seen what sort of man he was whom the king delighted to honor, let us see what honors were instituted by kings for other deserving men.