FOOTNOTES:
[109] “Her Majesty told the ladies, that if the Bishop held more discourse on such matters, she would fit him for heaven; but he should walk thither without a staff, and leave his mantle behind him.”
[110] Life of Raleigh, by Oldys.
[111] Lady Morgan’s France in 1829-30.
CHAPTER XV.
THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD.
“Where are the proud and lofty dames,
Their jewell’d crowns, their gay attire,
Their odours sweet?
Where are the love-enkindled flames,
The bursts of passionate desire
Laid at their feet?
Where are the songs, the troubadours,
The music which delighted then?—
It speaks no more.
Where is the dance that shook the floors,
And all the gay and laughing train,
And all they wore?
“The royal gifts profusely shed,
The palaces so proudly built,
With riches stor’d;
The roof with shining gold o’erspread,
The services of silver gilt,
The secret hoard,
The Arabian pards, the harness bright,
The bending plumes, the crowded mews,
The lacquey train,
Where are they?—where!—all lost in night,
And scatter’d as the early dews
Across the plain.”
Bowring’s Anc. Span. Romances.
Romance and song have united to celebrate the splendours of the “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” The most scrupulously minute and faithful of recorders has detailed day by day, and point by point, its varied and showy routine, and every subsequent historian has borrowed from the pages of the old chronicler; and these dry details have been so expanded by the breath of Fancy, and his skeleton frame has been so fleshed by the magical drapery of talent, that there seems little left on which the imagination can dilate, or the pen expatiate.