which is said to have won the Newdigate prize for Dean Burgon's poem on Petra. Nor is Mont Orgueil by any means lacking in tragic "foot-notes" to history. William Prynne had been condemned to lifelong imprisonment by the Star Chamber in 1634, and to lose both his ears in the pillory. Two years previously he had published his Histriomastix, "a volume of over a thousand pages," in which he had upheld, with many ancient and modern instances, the immorality of the drama and of play-acting. Unfortunately, at about this time Henrietta Maria had herself taken part in some private theatricals, and a certain passage in the index, "reflecting on the character of female actors in general, was construed as an aspersion on the Queen." For this, and other offences, he received the savage sentence, which was carried into execution with unrelenting cruelty. At first he was imprisoned in the Tower; but three years later (having in the meanwhile been found guilty of another "seditious libel," and branded on both cheeks) he was removed, first to Carnarvon Castle, and afterwards to Mont Orgueil. With the meeting of the Long Parliament, in 1640, Prynne was immediately set at liberty. In Jersey he had occupied an enforced and tedious leisure by indulging a propensity for verse-making. His Mount Orgueil, or Divine and Profitable Meditations, was published in 1641; and A Pleasant Purge for a Roman Catholic in 1642; "Rhyme," says Mr. C. H. Firth, in the Dictionary of National Biography, "is the only poetical characteristic they possess." A line or two may be quoted from Mount Orgueil as a sample:
Mount Orgueil Castle is a lofty pile,
Within the Easterne parts of Jersy Isle,
Seated upon a Rocke, full large and high,
Close by the Sea-shore, next to Normandie.
The poet then goes on to tell us how this stronghold is sometimes assaulted—but assaulted to no purpose—by sea and wind, "two boystrous foes":
For why this fort is built upon a Rocke,
And so by Christs owne verdict free from shocke
Of floods and winds; which on it oft may beate,
Yet never shake it, but themselves defeate.