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unparalleled unconsciousness of the delays, the charms, the pauses and preparations of imagery. Her strength does not dally with the parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant of those rites. Her lesser work, therefore, is plain narrative, and her greater work is no more. On the hither side-the daily side of imagery she is still a strong and solitary writer; on the yonder side she has written some of the most mysterious passages in all plain prose. And with what direct and incommunicable art! "Let me alone, let me alone,' said Catherine. 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You left me too I forgive you. Forgive me!' 'It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again, and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer-but yours! How can I? They were silent, their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears." "So much the worse for me that I am strong." cries Heathcliff in the same scene. "Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you Oh God, would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"

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Charlotte Brontë's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech of one like herself acting the central part in the dreams and dramas of emotion that she had kept from her girlhoodthe unavowed custom of the ordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprised the world. Emily had no such confessions to publish. She contrived-but the word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew nothing of stealth-to remove herself from the world; as her person left no image, so her "I" is not heard in literature. She lends her voice in disguise to her men and women; the first narrator of her great romance is a young man, the second a servant woman; this one or that among

the actors takes up the story, and her great words sound at times in paltry mouths. It is then that for a moment her reader seems about to come into her immediate presence, but by a fiction she denies herself to him. To a somewhat trivial girl (or a girl who would be trivial in any other book, but Emily Brontë seems unable to create anything consistently meagre or common) to Isabella Linton she commits one of the most memorable passages of her work, and one which has the rare image I had almost written the only image, so rare is it: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes rained down tears among the ashes. The

clouded windows of hell flashed for a moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed and drowned." But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil or circumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." "I have to remind myself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat." "Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I have said to myself; 'I'll have her in my arms again.' If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep." What art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for the clash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers."

Emily Brontë was no student of books. It was not from among the fruits of any other author's labor that she gathered these eminent words. But I think I have found the suggestion of this action of Heathcliff's-the disinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient Irish legend, as has been suggested, did Emily Brontë take her incident; she found it (but she made, and did not

find, its beauty) in a mere costume romance of Bulwer Lytton, whom Charlotte Brontë, as we know, did not admire. And Emily showed no sign whatever of admiration when she did him so much honor as to borrow the action of his studio-bravo.

Heathcliff's love for Catherine's past childhood is one of the profound surprises of this unparalleled book; it is to call her childish ghost-the ghost of the little girl-when she has been a dead adult woman twenty years that the inhuman lover opens the window of the house on the Heights. Something is this that the reader knew not how to look for. Another thing known to genius and beyond a reader's hope is the tempestuous purity of those passions. This wild quality of purity has a counterpart in the brief passages of nature that make the summers, the waters, the woods, and the windy heights of that murderous story seem So sweet. The "beck" that was audible beyond the hills after rain, the "heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream of Heaven, Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobbing for joy; the bird whose feathers she-delirious creature -plucks from the pillow of her deathbed ("This-I should know it among a thousand-it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells and it felt rain coming"); the two only white spots of snow left on all the moors, and the brooks brim-full; the old apple-trees, the smell of stocks and wall-flowers in the brief summer, The Dublin Review.

the few fir trees by Catherine's window-bars, the early moon-I know not where are landscapes more exquisite and natural. And among the signs of death where is any fresher than the window seen from the garden to be swinging open in the morning, when Heathcliff lay within, dead and drenched with rain?

None of these things are presented by images. Nor is that signal passage wherewith the book comes to a close. Be it permitted to cite it here again. It has taken its place, it is among the paragons of our literature. Our language will not lapse or derogate while this prose stands for appeal: "I lingered under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

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Finally, of Emily Brontë's face the world holds no reflection, and of her aspect little written record. Wild fugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she broke away, exiled by the neglect of her contemporaries, banished by their disrespect, outlawed by their contempt, dismissed by their indifference. And such an one was she as might rather have taken for her own the sentence pronounced by Coriolanus under sentence of expulsion; she might have driven the world from before her face and cast it out from her presence as he condemned his Romans: "I banish you."

Alice Meynell.

THE KING'S CHAMPION.

The elaborate formalities which have accompanied the coronation of our monarchs through so many ages include many customs of great antiquity, the most curious and impressive of them all being the appearance of an armed and mounted champion, who offered to do battle with any one who should dispute the right of the sovereign to the Crown.

The office of champion is a survival of the ancient rite of the "ordeal by battle," one of the oldest and most widespread of judicial superstitions. In the following quotation from The Dooms of Ine (A.D. 688-725) we have the earliest direct reference to this custom: "There stands no other purgation in an accusation by a Saxon against a stranger save the ordeal." The Church. both in England and on the Continent, early adopted this pagan tribal custom as a Christian ceremony. Royal champions are mentioned as early as the days of Charlemagne, and Otto the First employed them in deciding the succession to the Empire. Doomsday Book contains many entries of cases where men offered to prove their rights or the rights of their lords by the ordeal of battle.

The right of a person charged with treason or capital felony to choose trial either by jury or by wager of battle was legal as late as 1819, when one Thornton, who was charged with the murder of Miss Ashworth, summoned his accuser, the victim's brother, to a trial by combat. After the issue of this challenge the case was not proceeded with, and the right of appeal to a wager of battle was abolished.

The office of king's champion in this country dates back to the time of William the First, who granted the castle and town of Tamworth and the manor of Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire to Robert de Marmion, Lord of Fontenaye in Normandy, on condition that he and

his heirs performed the service of champion to the kings on the day of their coronation. The Marmions thereafter continued to grow in wealth and power until the death, in 1292, of the fifth baron, Philip, who left two daughters but no male issue. The Tamworth estates passed to the elder daughter, Margery, who married Alexander de Frevile; the younger daughter, Joan, married Sir Thomas de Ludlow, who succeeded to the manor of Scrivelsby, and their only daughter wedded Sir John Dymoke, a knight of Gloucestershire, an ancestor of whom, fifty years before the Conquest, had married a daughter of the Prince of North Wales. The name Dymoke or Dymock is undeniably of Welsh origin, and Sir Bernard Burke has traced the family back to Tudor Trevor, lord of Hereford and Whittington, and the founder of the tribes of the Marches.

At the coronation of Richard II. Sir Baldwin de Frevile, a descendant of Philip de Marmion's elder daughter, claimed the championship as lord of Tamworth, and on the day of the ceremony rode, fully armed, upon a barbed horse, into Westminster Hall, there to offer combat to any who should gainsay the king's title. His claim was, however, disputed by Sir John Dymoke, lord of the manor of Scrivelsby, who was finally adjudged to be the rightful champion on the ground that the office was holden only by knight-service, and was attached to the manor of Scrivelsby. At the coronation of Henry IV. the then representative of the De Freviles revived the claim against Dame Margaret Dymoke, the widow of Sir John Dymoke, who asserted that she held Scrivelsby per baroniam and as head of the Marmion family, Her plea was successful, and her son Thomas officiated as champion in her place. In the event of the male line failing, the rights and

privileges of the female to perform grand serjeantries in respect to their lands at coronations have always been allowed by the Crown. In some instances the serjeantries were performed by the claimant in person, as in the case of Ela, Countess of Warwick, who held the manor of Hoke Norton by the serjeantry of carving before the king on Christmas Day.

There is no official record of the performance of the duties of champion until the coronation of Richard II., when the office was held by Sir John Dymoke, whose motto was "Dimico pro Rege." His challenge, we are told, was made in these words: "Yf ther be any man of high degree or low that will saie that this owre soverayne Liege Lorde Richarde, cousin and heire of the Kynge of England, Edward late deceased, ought not of right to be Kynge of England crowned, he is redy now and till the last houre of his brethe with his bodie to bete him like a false man and a traitor on what other daie that shall be apoynted."

Originally the challenge was given before the act of crowning took place; but later, when it became a mere act of state, it was made between the first and second courses of the great banquet which was held in Westminster Hall after the coronation had taken place.

Froissart quaintly tells us that in the midst of the coronation banquet of Henry IV. a "knight appeared called Dymoke, all armed, upon a good horse richly apparelled, and had a knight before him bearing his spear, and his sword by his side, and his dagger. This knight took the king a label, the which was read; therein was contained that if there was either knight, squire, or other gentleman that would say that King Henry was not the rightful king he was there ready to fight with him in that quarrel. That bill was cried by a herald in six places in the Hall and in

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At the coronation banquet of Henry VIII. and Catharine of Aragon, Hall picturesquely relates that after the second course had been served, there entered Sir Robert Dimmoke, to whom Garter King of Heralds cried, "Sir Knight, from whence come ye, and what is your pretence?" To which his own herald by proclamation replied, "If there be any person of what estate or degree soever he be that will say or prove that King Henry the Eighth is not the rightful inheritor and king of this realm, I, Sir Robert Dimmoke, here his champion, offer my glove to fight in his quarrel with any person to th❜utterance."

In the College of Arms is still preserved a portrait of Sir Edward Dymoke, champion of Queen Mary I., in the act of throwing down his gauntlet. He claimed for his fee "one cuppe of gold, the horse and furny ture with th'armoure which he that day weareth, and all other to his furnyture appertaining, and also xviij yardes of crymsyn sattynge for his lyvery, and full service of meat and drynk belonging to a baron to be conveyed to his lodgynges." He appears to have had some difficulty in getting these various articles, for we find him complaining to Sir William Cecil that he had been bidden to sue for a warrant for them, whereas at the previous coronation his father (Richard Cecil) had delivered to him all his perquisites without a warrant; he preferred, he said, to lose them rather than be driven to sue a warrant for such small things. From the following copy of the bill sent in to Sir William for some of the articles supplied for use at the coronation, it would appear that the champion's hand was more familiar with the "shworde" than the pen:

Item, for a shworde, gerdyll, and scabbard of velvet. xj8.

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XX8.

Item, for ij purdeynzyns gylte. xjs.
Item, for a poll-ax
Item, for a chasynge staff vjs. viijd.
Item, for a payre of spowres . xvjs.

Sm. total, iijl. ivs. viijd.

Pepys notes in his Diary, under 23rd April 1661, that it being Coronation Day, he rose about four and got to the Abbey, and with much ado did get up into a great scaffold, where with much patience he sat until eleven, but to his great disgust could not see any of the ceremonies. He afterwards went round to Westminster Hall, and was there more fortunate, for he saw "above all these, three lords, Northumberland, Suffolk, and Ormond, coming before the courses on horseback and staying so all dinner-time, and at last bringing up Dymock, the king's champion, all in armor, with his spear and target carried before him, and a herald proclaims, "That if any dare deny Charles Stewart to be lawful King of England, here was a champion would fight with him,' and with these words the champion flings down his gauntlet; and this he does three times in his going up towards the king's table. which when he is come, the king drinks to him, and then sends him the cup, which is of gold, and he drinks it off and then rides back again with the cup in his hand."

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At the coronation of James II. the champion was given a gilt cup in place of one of gold, greatly to his dissatisfaction. The arms he used were a suit of white armor, a pair of gauntlets, a sword, a pair of pistols, an oval shield with his arms painted thereon, a velvet saddle, a breastplate and trappings richly ornamented with gold and silver, a plume of red, white, and blue feathers, and trumpet-banners. These articles were the usual fees; but on this occasion he was required to return them to the Master of the Royal Armory, who paid the champion a fee by way of compensation. At the coronation of

William and Mary he claimed two gold cups for acting as champion for both the king and the queen. On his claiming the usual perquisites at Queen Anne's coronation, he was told that the armor he had used had belonged to Charles II., and could not be given him, but a fee of sixty pounds was ordered to be paid him, which the Board of Ordnance "hoped would be to his satisfaction."

In olden days it had been the custom to claim the arms, horse, and armor only in case a combat ensued; otherwise it was only at the sovereign's pleasure that they became the property of the champion. A combat never has resulted from the challenge, probably greatly to the ease and comfort of modern champions; although the Gazetteer for August 1784 says that after the champion had thrown down his gauntlet it was taken up by an old woman, who escaped with it from the Hall, leaving in its place her own glove, in which was a challenge to meet her next day at a specified hour in Hyde Park. This occurrence caused no little amusement in the Hall. Next day, at the appointed place and hour, some one appeared in the same dress, although generally supposed to have been a good swordsman in that disguise; but the champion politely declined to fight with one of the fair sex, and consequently did not put in an appearance. After the Revolution it was frequently a matter of speculation as to what course would be adopted if, as at one time appeared not improbable, the Pretender or one of his friends accepted the challenge and raised the gauntlet. Prynne in his Ephemeris Vita relates another mischance which occurred at this coronation. He says that "when the champion let off his horse to kiss the king's hand he fell down all his length in the Hall, when there was nothing in the way that could visibly cause the same, where

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