lances and cut sheer through the coats of mail. This so dispirited the Normans, that unable either to force the intrenchments, or remove the palisades, they retreated upon the column which William commanded, worn out with their fruitless attack. The duke, however, commanded the archers to advance anew, giving orders to them no longer to shoot point blank, but with an elevation, so that the arrows might descend within the intrenchments of the enemy. Many of the English were wounded by this manœuvre, chiefly in the face, and Harold himself had his eye struck by an arrow, notwithstanding which he still continued to fight at the head of his army. The Norman infantry and cavalry again advanced to the attack, en couraging each other by shouts of God aid us! and invocations to the Virgin; but they were replused by a sudden sally from one of the gates of the intrenched camp, and driven back upon a ravine covered with brushwood and thick grass, where from the roughness of the ground their horses stumbled, and falling confusedly and thickly upon each other were slain in great numbers. At this moment a panic terror seemed to seize the foreign army: a report arose that the duke had fallen, and a flight began which must soon have been fatal, had not William thrown himself before the fugitives, threatening and even striking them with his lance till he compelled them to turn back. Behold me! my friends, cried he, taking off his helmet, it is I myself, I still live, and by the help of God I shall be victorious. Upon this, the men at arms renewed their attack upon the intrenchments, but still found it impossible to make a breach in the palisades, or to force the gates, when the duke bethought himself of a stratagem, by which he might induce the English to break their ranks and leave their position. He gave orders to a squadron of a thousand horse to advance and afterwards to retire suddenly as if they fled. At the sight of this pretended flight the Saxons lost their presence of mind, and with one consent rushed from their intrenchments with their battle axes slung round their necks; suddenly a concealed body joined the fugitives who wheeled about, and the English, thrown into disorder and taken by surprise in their turn, found themselves assaulted on all sides with the sword and the lance, whose strokes they could not ward off, both hands being occupied in managing their ponderous battle-axes. Their ranks being once broken, the intrenchments were carried, and foot and horse indis criminately rushed in, but the close battle was still maintained with great obstinacy and hand to hand. Duke William had his horse killed under him, and Harold with his two brothers fell dead at the foot of their standard, which was instantly torn down and replaced by the sacred banner that had been sent from Rome. The remains of the English army prolonged the struggle, till the shades of night falling upon the field rendered it impossible for the combatants to distinguish each other except by the difference of language. "The few surviving companions of Harold, to use the words of an old historian, after having well fulfilled their duty to their country, dispersed in all directions, yet many covered with wounds or worn out with their exertions lay stretched along the neighbouring roads, whilst the Normans in the fierce and cruel exultation of their victory spurred and galloped their horses over the bodies of the vanquished. They remained all night upon the field of battle, and next day the duke, at the rising of the sun, drew up his army, and from the roll which had been written before their departure from St. Valery, called the names of all who had landed in England. Multitudes of these now lay dead or dying, stretched beside the Saxons, and those who had the good fortune to survive, enjoyed as the first fruits of their victory, the plunder of the slain. examining the dead bodies, thirteen were found with the monkish habit under their armour. These were the Abbot of Hida and his twelve companions; and the name of their monastery was the first which was inscribed in the black roll of the Conquerors. In "The mothers, the wives and the children of those soldiers who had willingly marched from the adjoining neighbourhood to die with the monarch of their choice, now hurried pale and trembling to the field, to claim and carry away the dead bodies which had been stript and plundered by the enemy. Two monks of the monastery of Waltham, which had been founded by the Saxon king, came humbly to the duke and requested the body of Harold, offering ten marks of gold for permission to pay the last duties to their benefactor. It was given them, and they repaired to the spot, but found it impossible amid the heaps of slain to distinguish the body for which they sought, so much was it disfigured by the wounds which covered it. Sad and despairing of success, they addressed themselves to a beautiful woman whom Harold had loved before he was king, and besought her to accompany them in a second search. Her name was Edith Swanes-hals, the swan-necked Edith. She consented to the mournful errand, and affection more quick-sight ed than either friendship or devotion soon led her to the mangled body of her lover." No battle could be more obstinately contested than that which decided the fate of England, and seated a new dynasty on the throne. It began at nine in the morning, and continued not only as stated by Mr. Thierry till night, but was prolonged throughout a great part of the night. The Duke of Normandy, according to some historians, had three horses killed under him, and Harold fought with such desperate valour, and so ably availed himself of the strong position which he had chosen, that but for his death, which happened late in the evening, a very different result might have taken place. Even after that fatal event, when the Saxons were at last driven from their intrenchments, they made so desperate a stand in a neighbouring valley, that the Normans took to flight, and William, hastening through the dark to the spot, met Eustace, Count of Bologne, and fifty of his iron clad knights flying at full speed. With the broken truncheon of his lance, which was all that remained to him, he rallied the fugitives for a moment, and the Count Eustace, as he leant over the neck of his horse to speak to the duke, received in the dark and from an unknown hand a blow between the shoulders, which caused the blood to burst out of his mouth and nostrils. The Norman historians delicately conceal the hand that dealt this, and appear to insinuate that it belonged to some Saxon warrior, but we think there can be little doubt that the correction came from William's broken truncheon. Be this as it may, the duke again charged the Saxons and finally drove them from the field. It is almost impossible to ascertain the exact numbers of the respective armies; but we think there can be little doubt, in opposition to the exaggeration of the Norman writers, that Harold's army was greatly inferior to that of the duke. It is evident that he fought the battle before his new levies had been made, and with that comparatively small body of troops with which he had attempted to surprise the Norman camp. Defeated in this, he availed himself of his military skill in intrenching his troops in ground which appears to have been ably selected, and in supplying the defect of numbers by the great strength of his position. He appears likewise by a device somewhat similar to that which was practised by Bruce at Bannockburn, to have intersected the ground over which he expected the Norman cavalry to charge with deep ditches, and towards the middle of the battle the stratagem took effect, and immense numbers of the invaders perished in these concealed pits.-Foreign Quarterly Rev. No. 12. RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LATE WILLIAM HAZLITT. HAZLITT used to play at rackets for five or six hours at a time: sometimes quarrelling with his adversary, but not bearing malice. He liked a stout antagonist. "That fellow," said he, speaking of one who showed himself disheartened, "will never do any thing in the world: he never plays well, unless he is successful. If the chances go against him, he always misses the ball; he cries Craven!"-" That," said some one," is French courage.' "I don't call it courage at all," said H. " and certainly not French courage. The French have fought well; they have endured too, more than enough,—without your present imputation. Did you ever fight a Frenchman ?"-"No."—"Then don't make up your mind yet to your theory: reduce it to practice, and see if it be bullet-proof." .... Miscalculating his expenses, he once found himself at Stamford reduced almost to his last shilling. He set off to walk to Cambridge, but having a pair of new boots on they gave him acute pain. In this predicament, he tried at twenty different places to exchange them for a pair of shoes or slippers of any sort, but no one would accommodate him. He made this a charge against the English. "Though they would have got treble the value by exchanging," said he, "they would not do it, because it would have been useful to me." "Perhaps," said some one, jestingly," they did not know that you came honestly by them."—“ Ah ! true," said H. "that did not strike me before. That shakes my theory in this respect, if it be true; but then, it corroborates another part of it; so the fact is valuable either way. There is always a want of liberality, either in their thoughts or actions." [This was merely humour.] became the "He is so The poetry of subject of conversation. tawdry, and shallow, and common-place, and full of fine words," said some one, "that I cannot endure him. I am sick before I get to the end of a canto of his pompous nonsense: you see the mean, vulgar thoughts underneath all. He always reminds me of one of the fellows at Bartholomew Fair."-" He is certainly very bad," said another, assentingly; he is like a great, stupid boy, who has got into five syllables,' and cannot get out."- "There is a sense of his own imperfections in all this," observed Hazlitt, mixed with a notion of his being able to cheat the world out of its good opinion. He is like one of those dirty Jews who swagger about, put on half-a-dozen seals and a hundred rings, and think that they pass for lords!"? ....When I first knew Charles Lamb, I ventured one evening to say something that I intended should pass for wit. "Ha! very well; very well, indeed!" said he, "Ben Jonson has said worse things," [I brightened up, but he went stammering on to the end of the sentence]-and-and-and-- better!" A pinch of snuff concluded this compliment, which put a stop to my wit for the evening. I related the thing to Hazlitt, afterwards, who laughed. "Ay," said he, "you are never sure of him till he gets to the end. His jokes would be the sharpest things in the world, but that they are blunted by his good-nature. He wants malice,-which is a pity.""But," said I, "his words at first seemed so- ""Oh! as for that," replied Hazlitt, "his sayings are generally like women's letters; all the pith is in the postscript.” Several persons were regretting. that (who, we all agreed, was a singularly kind-hearted, vivacious, and intelligent man) should be eternally bruiting one opinion, that was disagreeable to every body. ""Tis like a rash," said Hazlitt," and comes out every summer. Why doesn't he write a book (if he has any thing to say) and get rid of his complaints at once?"" "What do you think of Xsaid some one. "He is a goodnatured, genteel, proud, foolish fellow," said Hazlitt, and as vapid as a lord. He was telling me yesterday about his dining every day on French dishes, &c. &c. whereas, to my knowledge, he is often obliged to go without any dinner at all." "He is like the Spanish Hidalgo, in Lazarillo de Tormes," said I, "who dines heartily upon a draught of water, and only eats the cow-heel and a lump of bread to give pleasure to his inferiors." "X-," pursued Hazlitt, "has but one golden idea in his treasury, and that is as to his own gentility. He keeps aloof, and would as soon ex change opinions with a rustic or a mechanic, as he would run against a chimney-sweeper. All that he has is traditionary-his father's-his grandfather's-his grandmother's! There has been no cross in the ideas of the family for the last two centuries. The consequence is, that they are all worn out. X- is as bad as a Bourbon. He wanted once to get employment from a bookseller, and when he was asked what recommendation he had, he replied'that he was the head of the oldest family in -shire!'" New Monthly Magazine. THE DISTANT GRAVE. They say the mighty ocean swells That moaning winds and inurmuring shells 'Tis his fitting tomb the sea-girt strand, I would I conld kneel above by thy grave, I would you slept mid familiar things, The more we feel divided, But my God is recalling the life he gave, Or course we do not quote this song for its novelty. Our object is to give the precise dialect in which it ought to be sung. THE POWCHER'S SONG. Az you zhall quickly heer. Ou, 'twas ma delyght in a shiny night, Case, we could fight or wrestle, lads, Jump over ony wheere. CHо Ou, 'twas ma delyght in a shiny night Ou, 'twas ma delyght in a shiny night, Az we went oot wan morning We yoiten off vor town, CHO. Ou, 'twas ma delyght in a shiny night, Ou, 'twas ma delyght in a shiny night, In the zeazon of the year, Then here's success to Powching, And here's look to ere a Gentleman Az wants to buy a heere, And here's to ere a Geamkeepoor, Az woona zell it deere. CHO. Ou, 'twas ina delyght in a shiny night, Ou, 'twas ma delyght in a shiny night, Blackwood's Magazine. The Topographer. MEMORABILIA OF KENT. (For the Mirror.) Here Nature nor too sombre nor too gay, ELTHAM. AT Eltham, King Henry III. in 1270, kept his Christmas, as did likewise in the years 1384-85 and 86, Richard II.; and in 1315, Henry the Third's Queen gave birth to a son, hence called John of Eltham. Here were the Parliaments of 1329 and 1375, held by the third Edward. Hither came the captive John of France, to be present at a magnificent entertainment, and here also was carried our female Solomon, Elizabeth to be benefited by the salubrity of the air, in her infancy "But Time as we see flies along in the wind, And leaves mighty marks of his hard hand behind." Eltham is deserted, and the splendid banquetting-hall, instead of diademed tenants, receives unlicked husbandmen; the courtier's laugh is supplanted by the blows of the flail, and the magnificent roofing is fast falling to decay. Midway between Rochester and Maidstone, four large stones of the pebble kind, placed erect, point out the mausoleum of a British and Saxon commander, who fell fighting hand to hand, in 455, five years after the latter's first landing with his forces in Britain. About two miles from Margate a gate with this distich: "Olim Porta fui Patroni Bartholomæi ; Et Ja: dux Ebor: 30 Junii 1683." commemorates the landing restoration of King Charles II. The earliest foundation of the Carmelite Friars, in England, was in the year 1240, which is still rendered memorable by their first monastery standing tolerably entire, a small distance from the village of Aylesford, and called the "Fryars;" there was convened the first general chapter of the order, in 1245. PENSHURST. JOHN, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France in the reign of Henry VI. had a palace at Penshurst, which on his decease descended to his next brother, Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester, immortalized by Shakspeare. Fortune seems to have fixed upon this spot for the production of men of goodness or genius, for here the incomparable Sir Philip Sydney was born: here also resorted the patriotic Algernon Sydney "To think as a sage, but to feel as a man." The oak planted at the birth of Sir Philip, and sung by Ben Jonson and Waller, has been removed by some blockhead, with as "little music in his' soul" as a turnip, or some prodigal who cared little about the associations! connected with it, so that he could raise sufficient money to appear at Brookes's or purchase a hunter. "A short mile north-west from the town of Hythe, stands Saltwood Castle," where met the four knights previous to their helping the turbulent Becket to martyrdom. Prince Edward, son of Henry III.' made the Barons of the Cinque Ports swear fealty to his father during the wars between that monarch and his rebellious nobles, at a spot half a mile eastward of Lynn Castle, called in ancient records, "Shipwey Crosse;" What a sad instance of Fortune's "slippery turns" have we in the fact, that the last male of the chivalrous and puissant Plantagenets, died in misery on the Eastwell estate, the mansion of which he helped to erect his name still remains to a well near the humble hut in which he dwelt. LEEDS CASTLE. Ir the reader be one of those "Who careth not for woman kynde, But doth them all disdain," he may thank Time and the patentee of uries that the days and deeds of King Neddy Secundus are over; for in the fifteenth of that monarch's reign, we are informed Sir Thomas de Colepeper was coolly hung by the chain of his drawbridge, at Leeds Castle, in this county, for having discourteously refused her majesty admittance when on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Within these walls, Joan of Navarre, second consort of Henry IV. was held in captivity for having conspired against her son-inlaw's life, until conveyed to Pevensey, by her jailor, Sir John Pelham. Edward the Black Prince received the order of knighthood at Stone Castle, near Gravesend. Dartford was the first scene of Wat Tyler's patriotism; here also Henry the Third's sister, Isabella, was married by proxy, to the Emperor Frederick, A. D. 1235; and in 1331, Edward III. returning from France, astonished the people with jousts and a splendid tournament. The latter prince seems to have entertained a penchant for this town, for in 1335 he founded a nunnery, to which retired early in life, Bridget, of York, one of the daughters of Edward IV. Henry VIII. subsequent to the abolition of the monasteries, repaired this building and fitted it up for a palace; and during her progress through this county, his daughter, Elizabeth, resided here two days. "The only remains of this monastic pile at present consist of a lofty embattled gateway, with some adjoining buildings used as a farmhouse;" but "The tower by war or tempest bent, While yet may frown one battlement, Demands and daunts the stranger's eye, Each ivied arch and pillar lone, Plead haughtily for glories gone." The original foundation of the bridge is supposed to be as ancient as the reign of Edward III. Within the church lies Sir John Spielman, the original introducer of the manufacture of paper in England, who died in 1607; the site of his paper-mill is now occupied by the gunpowder-mills, on the banks of the Darent. Faversham is supposed to have been the residence of the Saxon kings. Athelstan, about the year 930, assembled his Archbishops and Council to enact laws, and arrange methods for their observance in this town. So pleased with its situation was King Stephen and his family, that they erected an abbey here, and endowed it with numerous privileges; the two gateways of which were, in consequence of their ruinous condition, removed about fifty years ago. The most memorable modern event here, was the dreadful explosion, on the 17th of April, 1781, of the government powder-mills, whereby the workmen lost their lives, and the buildings of Faversham and the adjoining village of Davington were unroofed. The noise was heard at twenty miles distant. Westenhanger House, some short space from Hythe; was one of the spots selected by King Henry II. to conceal fair Rosamond, previous to her removal to Woodstock we find her "moated round with a drawbridge, a gatehouse, and a strong and lofty portal springing from polygonal pillars, and secured by a portcullis, and the outer walls high, and strengthened with towers, some square, others circular, and the whole embattled." Within Hever Castle it was that Henry VIII. passed his courtship of the lovely and unfortunate Anne Boleyn. It is traditionally affirmed, that when on his approach, he was wont to sound his bugle at the summit of an adjacent hill, for his "ladye love" and her domestic to prepare. Studfall Castle was one of the five forts or watch towers, erected by Theodosius. Through the Reculver's channel Harold's fleet is said to have sailed-a legend of considerable probability, on account of its shelter from storms and shoals. Ethelbert is supposed to have been interred within the church, as Weever states he saw a monument of very antique form, surmounted by two spires, in the south chantry. Leland, speaking of the chancel, says, "that at the entrance was one of the fairest and most stately crosses he had ever beheld." A KENTISHMAN. |