King Edward's party, was produced, according to popular belief, by the incantations of a professor of magic, one Friar Bungey, who accompanied the Yorkists to the field.* The first division of Warwick's army, led by the Earl of Oxford, owing to this circumstance outflanked and routed King Edward's third division, who, abandoning the field as lost, fled in confusion, spreading the report that Warwick had prevailed; and this had probably been true but for an unforeseen incident which decided the fortunes of the day. The Yorkists, to commemorate, it is said, the appearance of the three mock suns at the battle of Mortimer's Cross, in Herefordshire, which they interpreted as an omen auspicious to their cause, had adopted as a cognizance the white rose within a blazing sun. This badge decorated the jackets before and behind of Edward's retainers. On the surcoats of the Earl of Oxford's men glittered the star or silver mullet of De Vere; the archers under Somerset, in division No. 2 of Warwick's host, mistook the radiated badge of Oxford for the rose en soleil of Edward's party, and loosed their arrows in swift and deadly showers against their own companions in arms, who, confounded and dismayed, set up a cry of "treason,' and precipitately fled; Edward's divisions took advantage of the confusion, and closed with Warwick's two remaining columns, now outflanked in their turn by their enemy. " The hand-to-hand melée of the fight prevailed on and about the spot where the obelisk has been erected.t Edward's reserve now advanced, and turned the tide of battle in his favour; Warwick's forces were irretrievably routed, hewn down by bills, speared by the mounted men-at-arms, and dispersed. Warwick retreated to a neigh In the picture of the battle of Barnet the Yorkists bear a huge red banner, with a border and rose embroidered in gold. Edward appears on a white charger caparisoned with red cloth lined with blue, and semée with fleurs de lis; his vizor is raised, and a gold crown is on the top of his helmet; he has just pierced with a long lance the breast-plate of his antagonist the Earl of Warwick. In front two esquires are engaged hand to hand, armed cap-à-pié; in the background is an open country between two ridges of rock, and a castellated building on the summit of the right. Nothing can be more unlike the real features of the country than this view; the armour and weapons of the combatants are, however, in accordance with the period. It appears by the "Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV. in England, and the finall Recoverye of his kingdomes from Henry VI. A.D. 1471," edited by J. Bruce, Esq. F.S.A. for the Camden Society, that the Ghent MS. above described is but a brief and meagre abridgment of that curious tract; which in the time of Queen Elizabeth was in the possession of Fleetwood, Recorder of London. Even now forsake him, and of all his lands And, live we how we can, yet die we must. Thus does Shakspeare descant on the fall of this most brave and powerful English peer. His brother, Montacute, fell early in the fight, when the fatal error occasioned by the similarity of badges took place; it is not probable that he was killed in the act of deserting to the enemy, as one authority has stated. Shakspeare says, in accordance most probably with the fact,— "Montague hath breath'd his last, And to the latest gasp cried out for Warwick!" The dead corses of the brothers were conveyed to London, exposed to public view in St. Paul's cathedral, and then conveyed for interment at Bisham Priory, in Berkshire. The number of slain in this battle was considerable, but it is very variably stated by our historians. Fabyan says that they amounted to upwards of 1,500; Hall, 10,000; Stowe, 4,000. It appears probable that, in the number of 10,000, Hall includes the wounded as well as the killed, and even then it would be extremely large, for the aggregate of the combatants did not exceed perhaps 30,000. this point, however, much uncertainty prevails. The force of Edward has been estimated only at 9,000 men, while that of Warwick has been raised to 30,000 ;* such an account of course magnified the victor's skill and prowess. On Sir John Paston, writing to his mother from London, on Thursday in the Easter week of 1471, four days after the battle, says the slain were upwards of 1,000; the testimony of a document so immediately contemporaneous must be of considerable weight. The letter itself, as from one who had been engaged in the battle of Barnet on the Lancastrian side, under Oxford's banner, may be quoted as a lively illustration of the event; the persons wounded were doubtless *Fleetwood's MS. by Camden Society, pp. 20, 21. Holinshed, Vol. II. p. 685. letting you weet, blessed be God, my brother John (Paston) is alive and fareth well, and in no peril of death; nevertheless he is hurt with an arrow on his right arm beneath the elbow, and I have sent him a surgeon, which hath dressed him, and he telleth me that he trusteth he shall be all whole within right short time. "Mother, I recommend me to you, "It is so that John Milsent is dead, God have mercy on his soul! and William Milsent is alive, and his other servants all be escaped by all likelihood. Item, as for me I am in good case, blessed be God, and in no jeopardy of my life as me list myself, for I am at my liberty if need be. "Item, my Lord Archbishopt is in the Tower; nevertheless I trust to God that he shall do well enough: he hath a safeguard for him and me both; nevertheless we have been troubled since, but now I understand that he hath a pardon, and so we hope well. "There was killed upon the field half a mile from Barnet on Easter day the Earl of Warwick, the Marquis Montagu, Sir William Tyrell, and Lewis Johns, and divers other esquires of our country, Godmerston and Booth. And on the King Edward's party, the Lord Cromwell, the Lord Say, Sir Humphrey Bourchier of our country, which is a sore moaned man the number of more than a thousand. here, and other people of both parties to "And for other tidings it is understood here that Queen Margaret is verily landed and her son in the west country, and I trow that, as to-morrow or else the next day, the King Edward will depart from hence to her-ward to drive her out again."‡ Stowe informs us that the slain, meaning those of undistinguished rank, were buried on the plain where they fell, half a mile from Barnet, "where afterward a chapel was built in memory of them." It was a very usual practice to consecrate such spots of ground in the middle ages. Stowe says that the chapel was afterwards converted into a dwelling house, and that the upper part of the building remained unaltered in his day. + George Neville, Archbishop of York, brother to the Earl of Warwick. Paston Letters, vol. II. p. 62. § Stowe's Annals, p. 412. It is not improbable that Hadley churchyard and Barnet chapel, which had been erected seventy years before by an abbot of St. Alban's, Moote, afforded resting places for some of the untimely parted relics of the better sort. Such a tradition relative to Hadley churchyard still lingers at Barnet. From the same source we learn that the iron beacon or cresset which still is kept up, placed in form of a pitch pot on the lofty stair-case-turret of the fine old ivy-mantled tower of Hadley church, blazed throughout the night *Newcome, Hist. of St. Alban's, p. 279. An inscription in raised letters on the spandril of one of the arches of the nave of this chapel records the name of another person as its founder, "Orate Johannis Beauchamp fundatoris hujus op'ris." The words pro animá are defaced. An antiquary, I am told, lately remarked to the sexton who shewed him the building, that the erasure was perpetrated by the zeal of the first reformers; but the sexton assured the antiquary he was in error, for he had himself accidentally, a few days before, knocked off the letters with a broom. Lysons gives the in ing the inscription 1494, and on the right side a quatrefoil flower, on the left a wing; the same cognizance is carved over the arches of the nave of Enfield church, and has been considered to be the rebus of a prior of Walden named Rosewing.* I am not aware that there is any evidence of a prior of Walden being so named. It is much more probably the cognizance of Sir Thomas Lovell, Knight of the Garter and Banneret in the time of Henry VII.† I have credible tidings that the king's great enemies and rebels, accompanied with enemies, estrangers, be now arrived, and landed in the north parts of this his land, to the utter destruction of his royal person, and subversion of all his realm, if they might attain [prevail]; whom to encounter and resist the king's highness hath commanded and assigned me under his seal sufficient power and authority to call, raise, gather, and assemble, from time to time, all his liege people of the shire of Norfolk and other places, to assist, aid, and strengthen me in the same intent. "Wherefore, in the king's name and by authority aforesaid, I strictly charge and command you, and in my own behalf heartily pray you, that, all excuses laid apart, ye and each of you in your own persons defensibly arrayed, with as many men as ye may goodly make, be on Friday next coming at Lynne and so forth to Newark, where, with the leave of God, I shall not fail to be at that time, intending from thence to go forth, with the help of God, you, and my friends; to the recounter of the said enemies, and that ye fail not hereof as ye tender the weal of our said sovereign lord and all this his realm. Written at Bury the 19th day of March, OXYNFORD. "To my right trusty and well beloved Henry Spilman, Thos. Seyve, John Seyve, James Radclif, John Brampton the elder, and to each of them." Paston Letters, vol. II. p. 59. * Robinson's Hist. of Enfield, vol. II. p. 2. The same badge occurs in the vaulting of the choir of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and there appears in colours as follows: A quatrefoil gules, tied by a cord or, to a bird's wing erased sable. Mr. Willement in his recently published account of the restoration of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, has assigned this badge to Sir Thomas Lovell, K.G., and has appended the following note, which is decisive as to its appropriation : "A wing sable, the bone embrued, is given as Every vestige of the --" intestine shock And furious close of civil butchery," of which the elevated plain near Barnet was the scene, has been swept away in the lapse of upwards of four centuries. No earthworks shew "where trenching war channelled the fields;" no greensward hillock marks the promiscuous grave of sturdy English yeomen who fought and fell in this conflict, "Which sent, between the red rose and the white, [night." A thousand souls to death and deadly Of the chapel mentioned by Stowe not a vestige remains, nor am I able to indicate its actual site; it probably, however, stood near the spot occupied by the pillar, and where the roads to Hatfield and St. Alban's branch off in different directions. There, until the Reformation, it had invited by a charitable, if unavailing, superstition the prayers of the wayfaring Christian for the repose of the souls of those who died in the strife at Barnet. A. J. K. Communication of J. R. continued from p. 141. The "UNIVERSALITY of the French tongue" is a cherished assumption; and the boast, if narrowed in its construction to the popular use of the epithet (see Gent. Mag. for September, 1843, p. 259), or applied in space to Europe, is not without foundation. In 1784, on the command of Frederick of Prussia, whose predilection for the language was always so partially evinced, the subject was proposed as a prize essay by the academy of Berlin, which that same year crowned the discourses of J. C. Schwab and of Rivarol, now forming the second volume of the collection called "L'Esprit de Rivarol" (1808, 2 vol. 12mo). It is a brilliant, yet rather superficial discourse, not unlike himself, who, with Champfort and Champcenetz, composed the dazzling triumvirate of Parisian wits, and were competitors the badge of Lovell in the MS. Harl. 4632. The flower is probably derived from the second quarter of the arms on Sir Thomas Lovell's stall-plate, which remains on the Prince's side in St. George's Chapel, Sable, two chevrons argent, each charged with three cinquefoils gules, Muswell."-EDIT. And for colloquial fame, when sparkling thoughts, bright effusions, and liveliness of repartee constituted primary claims to social admiration. never, truly, did the French metropolis shine in more vivid splendour of conversational talent than at that period. The fact is emphatically attested by Madame de Stäel, herself a conspicuous star in the resplendent horizon, who says "Jamais cette société, tant vantée pour son charme et son éclat, n'a été aussi brillante et aussi sérieuse tout ensemble, que pendant les trois ou quatre premières années de la Révolution, à compter de 1788 à 1791." (Considérations sur la Révolution Française, tome i. p. 381, ed. 1818). Yet these flashes, or apparent inspirations, it is well known were not unfrequently "des impromptus faits à loisir," elaborated in previous study, rather than the spontaneous expression or bursting utterance of the moment. We, too, could produce our Chesterfields, our Selwyns, our Sheridans, and Currans, of traditional celebrity in that evanescent exertion of talent, followed by Theodore Hook, my gifted friend Dr. Maginn, with numerous others-all, however, eclipsed in native powers by Johnson, or at least not so fortunate in transmitted fame"Carent quia vate sacro.' But in our female circles we scarcely are enabled, I apprehend, to oppose any successful rivals to the Dudeffants, the Geoffrins, or Mademoiselle l'Espinasse, and far less to Madame de Stäel and Sophie-Arnaud-to the polished point of the one, or the keen allusions and apt, though too often unfeminine, vivacity of the other. The Revolu. tion eventually acted on these reunions, or "bureaux d'esprit" as they were termed, with equal influence, suspensive or mortal, as on all existing institutions; but, though not wholly extinct, they have never recovered their former lustre. Rivarol's maturer works, written during his emigration, were solid however; but the Abbé Gabriel Henry's "Histoire de la Langue Française" (1822, 2 vols. 8vo.) is of superior texture; and, at page 270 of the first tome, his remarks on this claimed universality of his tongue are entitled to notice. more Swift regretted that England had not followed the example of France, in founding an Academy for the correction and arrest of her excrescent tongue, forgetful, as observed by M. T. Varro, ("De Lingua Latina, pars prima,") that "omnis consuetudo loquendi in motu est." The recommendation was not adopted; and our vernacular idiom is, as I believe in consequence, considerably more copious than its rival. It is more widely spread in space, and embraces a larger mass of people in its use, than the French, with every prospect of a still greater relative extension. "Even now," to borrow the words of Dr. Arnold's inaugural lecture," it is covering the earth from one end to the other." It is, in fact, commensurate in practice, partial or general, with the empire of its birth, from whose surface, still more demonstrably and with greater precision of fact than the boast of the Hispano-German Cæsar, Charles V., the light of day is never wholly withdrawn, for on some portion of its vast expanse the sun is always visible above the horizon. And, as to its superior riches, I may appeal to a very simple test. Let any dictionary, French and English, be compared in their respective divisions, and the inferiority of the former will be at once apparent in its numbered pages; an uniform result which has often surprised, and not less mortified, many a French acquaintance, before whom, always selecting an edition of his country's press, for surer effect, I have tried this plain criterion. A more minute parallel may be seen in the Gent. Mag. for November 1841, p. 490. It is not, therefore, I confess, without *For an interesting parallel between the English and Italian or Spanish tongues, see" Paralleli dei tre vocabularj, Italiano, Inglese, e Spagnuolo," forming the third volume of Joseph Grassi's publication in 1817, conjointly with the poet Monti, and the latter's son-in-law, Count Perticari, of a highly esteemed work, 66 Proposta de alcune correzioni ed aggiunte al vocabulario della Crusca," Milano, 6 vol. 8vo. I may add that, notwithstanding the numerous additions to the French language within these fifty years, it still is less copious than, not only the English, but the Italian. |