court with his successor. The charity of a neighbor provided a winding sheet for the body which was removed for interment to the Abbey of Fontevraud, one of the wealthiest ecclesiastical establishments in France. Previous to the funeral, the body was laid in the Abbey Church when it is said to have shuddered convulsively at the approach of Richard, an undutiful son. The conquerer of Saladin, and hero of a hundred fights, Richard I. was also buried here, and Queen Eleanor of Guienne and Isabella d' Angouleme the Queen of his brother John.

In the old Scotch College in the rue Desbrosses St. Victor, Paris, were deposited in an urn of bronze gilt the brains of James II.— The mob in 1693 broke this urn and the brains contained in it were trampled upon the ground. The royal body which was deposited at the chapel of the English Benedictines was little less reverenced. At the time of the revolution the chapel was used as a prison, and among the prisoners was a Mr. Fitzsimons, who witnessed the treatment to which the body was subjected and who thus describes what he saw :

"I was a prisoner in Paris, in the convent of the English Benedictines, in the Rue St. Jacques, during part of the revolution. In the year 1793 or 1794 the body of King James II of England was in one of the chapels there, where it had been deposited some time, under the expectation that it would one day be sent to England for interment in Westminster Abbey. It had never been buried. The body was in a wooden coffin, enclosed in a leaden one, and that again enclosed in a second wooden one, covered with black velvet. While I was a prisoner, the saus-culottes broke open the coffins, to get at the lead, to cast into bullets. The body lay exposed nearly a whole day. It was swaddled like a mummy, bound tight with garters. The sans culottes took out the body, which had been embalmed. There was a strong smell of vinegar and camphor. The corpse was beautiful and perfect; the hands and nails were very fine; I moved and bent every finger. I never saw so fine a set of teeth in my life. A young lady, a fellow prisoner, wished much to have a tooth; I tried to get one out for her, but could not, they were so firmly fixed. The feet also were very beautiful. The face and cheeks were just as if he were alive. rolled his eyes; the eye-balls were perfectly firm under my finger. The French and English prisoners gave money to the sans-culottes for showing the body. They said he was a good sans-culottes, and. they were going to put him into a hole in the public church yard, like other sans-culottes, and he was carried away, but where the body was thrown I never heard." George IV tried all in his power to get tidings of the body, but could not. Around the chapel were several wax moulds of the face hung up, made probably at

I

the time of the King's death, and the corpse was very like them. The body had been originally kept at the palace of St Germains, when it was brought to the convent of the Benedictines. Mr. Porter, the prior, was a prisoner at the time in his own convent.

During the French Revolution the mob further signalized their hatred of Royalty by scattering the ashes of the dead Kings and mutilating their Statues. The tombs of the French Kings buried at St. Denis were opened by the revolutionists and their contents emptied into the neighboring ditches. It was only in 1813 when some workmen were engaged in repairing the vaults at Windsor that they accidentally came upon the coffin of Charles I. A doubtful point of history was then cleared up, for the contents of the plain leaden coffin, on which was inscribed in large legible character, "King Charles, 1648," were examined in the presence of the Prince Regent, (George IV..) Sir Henry Halford, Sir Henry Peyton, and others. Within the leaden coffin was one of wood, very much decayed, in which, carefully wrapped in cloth, was the body. The skin of the face was found dark and discolored, the forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of their muscular substance; the cartilege of the nose was gone; the left eye was open and full in the first moment of its exposure, though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so characteristic of the period of his reign was perfect. The strong resemblance of the face to that of Charles I on the coins, busts, and especially the likenesses of Vandyke left no doubt as to its identity. Upon removing the bandage, the head was found to be loose and was held up to view. It bore evidence of having been severed by a heavy blow, inflicted with a sharp instrument.

Nothing is known of the resting place of Lord Protector. Cromwell. After his State funeral and burial at Westminster, his corpse was disinterred and treated with indignity. His head was exposed from the top of Westminster hall, while his body hung from the gallows in Tyburn. After remaining sometime in these positions they were cast into a hole, but no one knows the locality of it, though some learned antiquarians suppose it was near Red Lion Square, London.

The ill-fate attending royal races-their vicissitudes in life--may be further illustrated by two instances, furnished by the successors of Charlemagne in France and the Jameses in England. The son of Charlemagne, Louis de Babonnaire, died for want of food, in consequence of a superstitious panic. His successor, Charles the Bald, was poisoned by his physician. Charles' son, Louis the Stutterer, was also poisoned. Charles, king of Aquitaine, brother of the Stutterer, met his death by a blow on the head from a gentleman he was endeavoring by way of frolic to terrify. Louis III,

successor to the Stutterer, a gallant Prince, having cast his eyes upon a handsome girl, the daughter of a citizen named Gormand, as he was riding through the streets of Tours, pursued her instantly. The terrified girl took refuge in a house, and the king, thinking more of her charms than the size of the gateway, attempted to force his horse after her, but broke his back and died on the spot. He was succeeded by his son, Carloman, who fell by an ill-directed spear, thrown by one of his own servants at a wild boar, although the dying Prince had the generosity to charge the beast with his death. Charles the Fat perished of want, grief and poison altogether. His successor, Charles, the Simple, died in prison of penury and despair. Louis the Stranger, his successor, was killed while hunting. Lotharius and Louis V, the two best kings of the race of Charlemagne, were both poisoned by their wives, to whose little indiscretions they had paid too much attention. Of the whole line, after a revolution of 230 years, there now remained one, Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and he, after a struggle in defense of his rights against the ambitious and active Capet, sunk beneath the fortune of his antagonist and ended his days in a lonely prison.

In England the Stuarts were steadily unfortunate.

Robert the III broke his heart because his eldest son was starved to death, and his youngest, James, made a prisoner. James I, after having beheaded three of his nearest kindred, was assassinated by his own uncle, who was tortured to death for it. James II was slain by the bursting of a piece of ordnance. James III, when flying from battle, was thrown from his horse and murdered in a cottage, into which he had been carried for assistance. James IV fell in Flodden Field. James V died of grief for the wilful ruin of his army at Solway Moss. Henry, Lord Darnley, was assassinated and then blown up in his palace. Mary was beheaded in England. James I and James VI are supposed to have been poisoned by Buckingham. Charles I was beheaded. Charles II was for many years an exile. James II lost his crown and died in banishment. Anne, after a glorious reign, died of a broken heart, occasioned by the quarrels of her favored servants. The posterity of James II have remained wretched wanderers in a foreign land.

We have again wandered a long way out of our path and we are not quite sure that our reader takes as much pleasure as we do in these flights. But what reader is satisfied to jog on forever in the same beaten track. It is usually, if not universally the case, that in what one reads and what one hears, one expects to find something with which one was formerly unacquainted. If this reasonable expectation is disappointed, and an author goes plodding on indulging in a trifling minuteness of narration, in prolix

descriptions and an abundance of common places, he is sure to fill the reader with languor and disgust. Napoleon III, at a period of excitement in France, gave utterence to the sententious remark: "For order I will be responsible." We wish we could say with equal confidence, "For preserving our reader from languor and disgust we will be responsible." In any event the reader shall not be cloyed with trite and obvious thoughts as if he had no apprehension of his own. Be it our object to give him something on which to exercise his reason and entertain his fancy. His attention will be thus repaid and he will not only excuse but delight, as we do, in those excursions through the regions of the past, which interrupt our narrative, but which do not long prevent our returning to the starting point. Whether we pursue beaten paths or give reins to imagination we seek to be plain, and invariably, as brief as is consistent with perspicuity, though this is not always the best policy, as it cannot be dissembled, that, with inattentive readers, darkness frequently passes for depth.

In the next succeeding chapter, clearing our brain from all fumes of fancy, we shall resume our narrative, and conduct the reader— we flatter ourselves he does not belong to the inattentive classmore rapidly forward on the journey from the sea coast to the interior.

CHATHAM

CHAPTER XXI.

FAVERSHAM

ROCHESTER SIR FRANCIS DOYLE

GADS HILL COBHAM HALL-MSS. LETTERS OF SIR JOHN PEYTON, GOVERNOR OF THE TOWER AND OF THE ISLAND OF JERSEY— EDMOND BEALES-THE REFORMATION.

Emerging from the church at Faversham we saw the train approaching, the train by which we expected to reach Chatham. Hurrying to the station and stepping into a carriage we were greeted with glad surprise by one of our earliest and best English friends, Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, professor of poetry at

Oxford, who was returning to London from a jaunt in France. Sir Francis was an intimate friend of Osmond Priaulx, at whose house we first met him at dinner in 1862, and where we had been in the habit of meeting him under the same pleasant circumstances, every Thursday, for years. He was one of a small coterie of literary and political celebrities who assembled every week at each others houses.

Many of them are dead, some are superannuated and others have retired from public employments. How melancholy it is to travel from one's country, and to make acquaintance with estimable men abroad, whom we are never to see again. How rapid a career is human life! Happy the man who has it in his power to employ it in doing good. Sir Francis Doyle whom we now met with, so unexpectedly, is a thoroughly companionable and delightful man—not only a poet, but a distinguished poet.. He writes with taste, abounds in elegance, wholly reproves the spasmodic efforts of the metrical manipulators of the age, adhering to nature in a pure and unaffected style, replete with chaste and classic diction. His impassioned thought is elucidated and ennobled in all the sparkling imagery of truly poetic and romantic inspiration. He is plain and unassuming in manner and attire, would pass very well for one of the squirearchy, is fond of the chase and the pursuits of the country gentleman. He has written and published a good deal of poetry and some lectures but they have acquired no general popularity. He often referred in a humorous way to their failure to attract public attention, and said: “I don't know why it is; people don't care to read what I write." It was not difficult for us to see that he attributed this indifference to the bad taste of the reading public. Though he took a rather saturine view of his position with the public, we soon discovered that no one was more favorably regarded by the liter ary world-his laurels were green, however conscious he was of it, though his locks were gray. Sir Francis Doyle, in his demeanor and personal appearance, is considerably above the common order, and is altogether a handsome and noble looking man. Among the choice spirits in this particular coterie was the great novelist Thackeray, but we never happened to meet him at one of the reunions. On one occasion, shortly after our arrival in London in 1862, we received an invitation from Edwin de Leon, now (1880) of Washington City, formerly United States Consul General in Egypt, to meet Thackeray at dinner. A previous engagement prevented our acceptance, and we thus lost the opportunity of meeting that eminent man of letters. He was soon afterwards struck down with disease, and to the inexpressible grief of a wide circle of personal friends, and to all generous minds and lovers of