I saw General Jackson riding in an open carriage, in earnest conversation with his successor, as I was on the way to the Capitol to witness the inaugural oath. A few days after, I shook hands with him for the last time, as he sat in a railroad-car, about to leave Washington for the West. Crowds of all classes leaped up to offer such salutations, all of whom he received with the same easy, courteous, decided manner he had exhibited on other occasions.
SHAKSPEARE'S CARICATURE OF RICHARD III.
'The youth of England have been said to take their religion from Milton, and their history from Shakspeare:' and as far as they draw the character of the last royal Plantagenet from the bloody ogre which every grand tragedian has delighted to personate, they set up invention on the pedestal of fact, and prefer slander to truth. Even from the opening soliloquy, Shakspeare traduces, misrepresents, vilifies the man he had interested motives in making infamous; while at the death of Jack Cade, a cutting address is made to the future monarch upon his deformity, just TWO years before his birth! There is no sufficient authority for his having been
'Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half-made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable,
The dogs bark at me, as I halt by them.'
A Scotch commission addressed him with praise of the 'princely majesty and royal authority sparkling in his face.' Rev. Dr. Shaw's discourse to the Londoners, dwells upon the Protector's likeness to the noble Duke, his father: his mother was a beauty, his brothers were handsome: a monstrous contrast on Richard's part would have been alluded to by the accurate Philip de Comines: the only remaining print of his person is at least fair: the immensely heavy armor of the times may have bowed his form a little, and no doubt he was pale, and a little higher shouldered on the right than the left side: but, if Anne always loved him, as is now proved, and the princess Elizabeth sought his affection after the Queen's decease, he could not have been the hideous dwarf at which dogs howl. Nay, so far from there being an atom of truth in that famous wooing scene which provokes from Richard the sarcasm:
'Was ever woman in this humor wooed?
Was ever woman in this humor won?'
Richard actually detected her in the disguise of a kitchen-girl, at London, and renewed his early attachment in the court of the Archbishop of York. And while Anne was never in her lifetime charged with insensibility to the death of her relatives, or lack of feeling, she died not from any cruelty of his, but from weakness, and especially from grief over her boy's sudden decease. Richard indeed 'loved her early, loved her late,' and could neither have desired nor designed a calamity which lost him many English hearts. The burial of Henry VI. Richard himself solemnized with great state; a favor that no one of Henry's party was brave and generous enough to return to the last crowned head of the rival house.
Gloucester did not need to urge on the well-deserved doom of Clarence: both Houses of Parliament voted it; King Edward plead for it; the omnipotent relatives of the Queen hastened it with characteristic malice; they may have honestly believed that the peaceful succession of the crown was in peril so long as this plotting traitor lived. No doubt it was.
It is next to certain that Richard did not stab Henry VI., nor the murdered son of Margaret, though he had every provocation in the insults showered upon his father; was devotedly attached to King Edward, and hazarded for him person and life with a constancy then unparalleled and a zeal rewarded by his brother's entire confidence.