saddest and the homeliest; and this circumstance, added to his other qualities, mental and corporal, acquired him the title of the Grim Franklin.

And thus flourished Anthony Monkshaw, self-poised and self-appreciated; even his idol, the White Rose Sovereign, he regarded with sentiments which, devoted as they were, owed much of their devotion to that bigoted factionary feeling which led him to identify his monarch with himself.

In two instances alone was Anthony of Heronswood known to have deviated from the general outline of character, thus roughly delineated.

The one was, that however ordinary the rest of his attire might be, he uniformly wore the weighty golden collar of suns and roses interchanged, having the white lion of the house of March appended; Edward's favourite guerdon to his most distinguished adherents, and placed upon Monkshaw's shoulders by that prince himself.

The other exception to his general rule, referred to the bright creature who called the grim Franklin of Heronswood father.

If Anthony disdained to look beyond himself for honour, gratification, or comfort, he found so pleasing and so influential a portion of that self in his daughter Floralice, that in lavishing upon her the most unbounded affection, and even deference, he fell into the common delusion; and never doubted but he was enriching his child with the indulgences he was in fact bestowing upon himself. Nor had he occasion to detect his error so long as the tide of life carried along the interests of both in the same safe channel; an obstacle however shot into the stream, and thenceforth the divided currents branched asunder.

Floralice Monkshaw was now in the full roselike bloom of summer, and a splendid flower she was.

Who has ever seen the Marchioness Jane of C-? She might sit for the picture of Floralice; but, to those who have not, I despair of painting her. You would not call her masculine looking; for her expression was most magically soft when it beamed upon you, so you pronounced her heroic. You confessed that fierte sate throned and diademed upon her features; but, in that queenly brow, and wreathing lip, you only felt how passing beautiful pride could look; and, if it had brought in its train the other deadless sins, you deemed that shrine might have made saints of them all,

Floralice was a compound of the eagle and the dove. Where she loved, all considerations retired before it. Upon her father she doated! and long and bright years threw no shadow upon her affection, which was as much love as gratitude. It was often jestingly asserted among her acquaintance, that, if she married, Floralice Monkshaw could never love a husband so entirely, even though she were to govern him as absolutely as her father. But the time came when Floralice was called upon to resign the gentle acquiescence in delightful feelings, and the passive enjoyment of indulged affections; and if the disturber of her sunshine produced the most cruel conflict in her bosom, it was principally because he had dwelt there, side by side with her most cherished joys, too long to be ejected with ease when he could no longer be retained with impunity.

Sir Baldwin Hercey was the only son of a Warwickshire knight, whose distinguished exploits on the field of Azincour, had greatly advanced him in the favour of Henry the Fifth, but whose zeal, in furnishing men and moneys for the French wars, had impoverished his estates to such an extent, that, out of eight lordly manors, only one remained to him, at the time when Henry's untimely death cut off all hope of present remuneration. The protectoral government overlooked him; and shortly after the last war was lost in France, the boy Baldwin was left an orphan, to the guardianship of the grim Franklin of Heronswood. He was brought up with the little Floralice, and there was scarcely a year's difference between their ages. The eruption of the Rose conflicts effected (what political divisions generally do) an irreparable breach between two old friendly families, whose amity had gone the length of a projected matrimonial alliance.

Floralice, for the first time in her life, was thwarted by her father, in the matter on which the happiness of her life depended; she was commanded to think no more of Baldwin Hercey at a time when she could think of nothing else; in fine, the ivy was to be plucked from the elm, when the fibres of the one and the bark of the other made it impracticable, without fatal laceration to both.

The grim Franklin, we may be sure, had not suffered Sir Baldwin to follow his hereditary inclination for the Lancasterian rose, without employing all his rhetoric, enforced by some tolerably broad allusions to Floralice, in order to bias his young and enthusiastic ward: but all his

attempts had proved vain. Equally unsuccessful too had been Anthony's endeavour to alienate his daughter from her long cherished love. And so the affair ended. Sir Baldwin shared the battles and fortunes of king Henry: Monkshaw, with princely munificence, swelled the sinews of war from his own coffers to the duke of York and his sons,—and Floralice, through evil report and good report -in success or failure, in mournful separations or at clandestine interviews, ready alike to share the prosperity of her beloved with the most patient fondness, or to brave his misfortunes with the most generous abandonment of self; Floralice, the soft, the magnanimous Floralice, preserved, or rather fed, her affection for Baldwin Hercey.

At length the violence of the strife having much subsided, on the coronation of Edward the Fourth, Sir Baldwin found himself, it is true, in the reduced state common to the partizans of the losing side, and the fierce Franklin now despised his poverty, as much as he loathed his politics;-but still, to Floralice he brought the same heart,-and a form, Floralice thought, immeasurably improved by the hardy exercise of war, tempering the ripened vigour of manhood. Of course Hercey was not to be seen openly at Heronswood: so a regular system of private meetings was arranged between them; Floralice only stipulating that she should not be requested to abandon her father, so long as his hostility against Sir Baldwin, or, what was much the same thing, his life, lasted.

Now there was a certain Luke Tyler, near kinsman to the grim Franklin of Heronswood, who had always made a third in those youthful intimacies that grew up and flourished under the auspices of Monkshaw. He was ever a cringing, supple, crafty knave, and vindictive withal, as the rattlesnake, though, less generous than that reptile, he never gave notice of his spring.

The same qualities, not the less evil for being so paltry, which made Floralice dislike and contemn master Luke as a boy, excited her detestation when he grew to manhood.

Between Sir Baldwin and Tyler, however, there was a sort of friendship; for, ever since Luke had felt the weight of young Hercey's arm, one day, that he thrashed him pretty sufficiently, for stealing some candied plumbs from the weeping Floralice, he had outwardly shewn him as much respect as was needful to impose upon his unscrutinizing

nature; while from that time forth, to the hour of his death, a spirit of immortal malice, at once crawling and boundless, timid yet greedy, influenced Tyler's conduct towards Sir Baldwin Hercey.

The mantle of friendship Luke conceived to be the safest cover for his machinations; and as the warriors of old approached the beleaguered city under their Testudo, so did Luke Tyler skulk into the heart and fortunes of the youthful knight, only to ascertain in what places they might be assailed, and where they were most vulnerable.

Sir Baldwin Hercey would have hesitated to acknowledge Tyler as his friend; there was neither congeniality nor equality for that; but he flattered himself he had given the hound a salutary correction, which had amended his manners; and as a subjugated province is often amused by the victor with empty baubles, to compensate the actual dishonour it has sustained, so Luke Tyler was treated by Baldwin with a reckless generosity, too much alloyed by undisguised contempt to be palatable to that keen-eyed individual. Master Luke, however, reaped too much of paltry gratification to his malice from the advantages which the precipitate and somewhat haughty temper of Sir Baldwin afforded him, not to endure, with abject dissimulation, all the young knight's assumed superiority, till at length Sir Baldwin's unsuspecting heart misgave him for his injustice, and from that time forth, the inmost chambers of Hercey's bosom were laid open to the insidious foe; its own best feelings having traitorously unbarred the doors.

It could scarcely be said that Luke loved Floralice Monkshaw; indeed it may be disputed whether he loved a single human being, even himself not excepted; but he was an admirable hater; and as he proceeded in his path of skulking malice, employing the smooth pebble from the brook, as well as the poisoned arrow from the quiver; turning aside either to trample upon a flower, or uproot a plant, he came, at length, upon the bower of love, into whose recesses no snake had yet glided; yet in crawled Luke, and very nearly got his reptile head crushed in the attempt.

Truth to say, however successful Tyler might have been in his lesser machinations against Baldwin, he was singularly infelicitous when he proceeded to designs of a larger growth.

Educated at the Priory of Saint Se

pulchre, at Warwick, Luke Tyler had cultivated all the higher and more refined accomplishments, which in those days a monastery alone could teach.

He was a beautiful illuminator; no mean limner, and excelled in the exercise of several crafts; in architecture he was a special proficient; legendary lore found a capacious cabinet in his brain; he could somewhat of music; nor of all the sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, were those the meanest that flowed from the pen of Master Luke.

All these, and every other means which his subtle engine suggested, did Tyler put in requisition in favour of Floralice, from the first moment he perceived her inclination to Sir Baldwin Hercey. And so far he succeeded, that the communings between him and Floralice became far more frequent than Hercey (whose less scientific pursuits led him to heath and forest) quite approved. Luke's likings, however, fed upon Baldwin's dislikes; so he persevered, and, as he thought, prospered. But Fortune, whatever she may do to the brave, does not always favour the unscrupulous; and just when Luke Tyler had attained the point at which he imagined he might unfurl the banner of his hopes, the fickle jade tore it down, and trampled it under foot. To speak plainly, he one day told Floralice Monkshaw that he loved her, and she told him what we may as well not repeat.

Repulsed in this quarter, Master Luke applied himself to cultivate the good graces of the grim Franklin himself; but here he had apparently still less chance of success. Old Anthony had no very violent love for any of his poor kinsfolk. If they were independent, and kept aloof from the rich Franklin, they were welcome to do so; he never troubled his pate about them. If they haunted the dreary courts and dingy halls of Heronswood, so much the better, as long as they would patiently dance in his round, and while their habits and opinions jumped with his humour; but there was the difficulty.

At once the most suspicious and the most intolerant man alive, Monkshaw endured not the slightest contradiction or stricture; while a snarl and a shew of teeth (well if it were not a head and shoulders ejection through the gateway!) were the uniform and inevitable guerdon of ill-timed conciliation or unskilful flattery.

But even with the impracticable Franklin, Luke, as usual, for some time played his part successfully.

If Anthony could endure, he must needs agree with Master Tyler in conversation; and at such times he would shoot forth, from under his grey beetling eyebrows, a meteor glance of something very like complacency, at Luke's comments upon men and manners. A growl of welcome from Monkshaw's cavernous jaws, generally hailed his appearance at the homely but abundant board; and a gripe like a Bramah screw, accompanied the bidding to a repeated visit.

And when the Civil War broke out, just as the Lancasterian Hercey's star declined at Heronswood, did the Yorkist Tyler's culminate.

So now, dear and much-enduring reader, behold Luke Tyler at once the rejected suitor of Floralice, the treacherous confidant of Sir Baldwin Hercey, who hath just been permitted to repossess his impoverished manor at Redford, and the identical person now walking in yonder meadow with that dark burly man of age, who is dressed in a tawny leathern jerkin, partially covered by a cloak of russet serge; a fox fur tipped about his shoulders, and upon his broad furrowed brow, a slouching cap, large and wide, utterly unornamented, whose colour, originally scarlet, had now, from time and weather stains, assumed a most truculent die of blackish red; the far refulgent collar of suns and roses glowing over all this worn-out mockery of humility, marks him at once for the grim Franklin of Heronswood.

It was the afternoon of a blazing summer's day. Old Dunsmoor, with his patches of ancient trees and open fells intermixed, lay panting and parching beneath the meridian sun. Not a breeze durst stir, and the steer and the steed stood motionless in the shallow waters of the old pit, which scarcely reached their knees, and whose high red banks were wooded with luxuriant but motionless trees; the verdure of leaf and herb was thirsty and dull; the very shade was hot, and the grass dry. The weathercock on Bilton steeple was shining and asleep; and the little blue brook, that used to twine like a coloured snake around those delightful meads, now plaintively tinkled over its enamelled bed, whose Mosaic had lost half its brilliance.

Anthony Monkshaw, after lending a heedful ear to some communication from his associate, stalked before him through the blinding heat of the meadow, leaping the river which bisected it with a strength and agility that put to shame the awk

ward sprawl of Luke, and clearing a stile that led into a thicket of princely old timber; here, having reached a spot where their conversation might be free from intruders, and themselves protected from the insupportable heat, the Franklin paused until his laggard kinsman should come up with him.

eye.

A close and grass-grown alley, where the woodbine hung in perfumed clusters upon the maple, and the briony, strangling what she embraced, spread in meretricious draperies over the hazel, led them into a sylvan area, where, at regular intervals, the trunks of elm, ash, and oak trees, soaring into the summer heavens, concealed their height from the Massive columns were their stems, and their lowest boughs meeting at a great distance from the earth, lent the place a resemblance to some old Gothic Chapter-house. Thick, bright, and feathery, sprang the fern beneath; and bashfully blue, the light harebell wooed in vain the far distant breezes to its fragile clusters. A few patches of gleaming sky from above, and the sunny glow through the boles and vistas rare, redeemed that grove from the character of gloom, which the loftiness of the trees, the masses of foliage, the profound stillness, and the very form of the inclosure contributed to produce.

Here then halted Anthony Monkshaw, awaiting with grim composure the approach of the discomfited Luke, who hurried panting up the alley, and at length reached the old Franklin, the usual clayey hue of his brow and cheek being now diversified with streams of perspiration; and his rats-tail hair more hopelessly lanky than ever.

Monkshaw, in the meanwhile, stood as calm and as cool as if he had been airing himself in the pleasant solary at his own manor house; and with a grisly smile he thus began:

"And now, Master Luke, sith thou hast drawn breath, and wiped thy brow, prithee impart these weighty tidings, that were too pregnant and too delicate to trust the echoes of yon moated Grange withal."

"A bird of the air shall carry the matter!" was Luke's reply, conveyed in a low cowardly tone, as strongly contrasted with the Franklin's bluff round voice, as his grovelling, chidden air was to Anthony's dreadnought figure.

"A bird of the air, good kinsman, shall carry the matter and, even in this deep woodland, I would use caution, lest "

"Lest we offend the Erl-king-eh ?that wont to scare our Saxon ancestors:

-or, haply, bring upon us a troop of nymphs and fauns, in the character of eaves-droppers! Body o' me man! what, is this mystery so sacred, that even these old silent woods are not to hear it, lest they should babble when the wind comes back again to set them a nodding and gossiping? Why, one would think there was to be another tale of the bloody templar !"

"If he whom men call the grim Franklin of Heronswood, take not the better head," was Luke's bold reply, "the Bloody Templar's Chronicle may find a sequel yet!"

Anthony raised his shaggy brows, and opened wide his clear blue eyes upon the speaker, but Luke had chosen his tone well, and the attitude of importance, and even of admonition, which now characterized the supple kinsman, was so novel that it partly startled, and partly pleased the grim Franklin.

"Well, well man! I will be patient! Thou knowest I deem not lightly of thee, though I do gird at thee some times! Mass! there are few of whom Anthony Monkshaw would either stoop to inquire, or tarry to hear advice! but I trust thy love to our house, and I know thou bearest a brain!-out with it then! why hast, brought me out here, like a love-sick virgin forsooth, to a woodland. tryste with her lover!"

The grim Franklin laughed aloud at his own conceit;-and the explosion hushed the gentle hollow melody of a wood-pigeon, the only voice of that sultry hour that was swelling forth its indolent, peaceful coo from an adjacent pine.

"It is not here!-the lover's tryste you speak of is not here!" and Tyler paused, either from embarrassment or design;—if from the latter motive, he soon saw cause to repent it, for Monkshaw's wrath arose, his very beard stirred with ire; and his eyes contracted, and his teeth closed, as if to let as little as possible of the internal fury escape before its time.

"Master Luke Tyler!" he said, and this time, Luke had no occasion to complain of his loud voice, for the prattle of the brook might be heard above it ;"Master Luke Tyler! whether you deem the granger of Heronswood hath as small value for his time, as a slothful hangeron, boots not me !-but, you have made me dance at your bidding, and, if my music is to be no better than a fool's babble,-I will look to the musician. Dog! let me depart with my errand, or by heaven's, I'll brain thee!"

And, suiting the action to the word,

Anthony lifted a walking staff, whose size and shape, added to his own massive rugged figure, made him no mean representative of the well-known Warwick cognizance.-Luke's presence of mind wavered for a moment only, he had not so long studied the grim Franklin for nothing.

Esquire of Heronswood!" he said, and even Monkshaw felt he spoke with dignity, "demean not yourself in the presence of your poor cousin, whose duty, as well as wish, it is, to respect the head of his house.-How would you have me speak, when my speech so nearly involves that house-ay, touches the very heart of its honour!"

Monkshaw lowered his staff, and as if ashamed of his passionate violence, turned slightly aside, listening with bent brow, and hands woven over his ragged staff, as Luke resumed his speech.

"Mine is a difficult, and an irksome office. I stand distracted between interest for my kinsman's honour, and affection for an old friend. If partiality for my friend sways me, I become an accomplice in a subject's disloyalty, and a child's disobedience: if zeal for the house, of which I am but a withered branch, prevail with me-how shall I escape imputations of treachery and selfishness?" Here Master Tyler sighed profoundly, and looked askance at the Franklin.

That furtive and instantaneous glance, shewed him how accurately he had calculated. Monkshaw had dismissed all fury from his brow; a new feeling seemed to have awakened there, but it was that dubious, indefinite expression which the sky wears before a change in the elements; or a strange dog, while you caress him, before he either shews his teeth, or wags his tail!-His ruddy cheek, at first grew pale, and then coloured over from his temples to his very throat; his breathing became thick, and violent, but he maintained his halfaverted posture, and seemed, at length, made up to await Luke's tidings, till they came in his own good time.

Tyler saw that the Franklin, by this time, was primed for his intelligence,— so he proceeded.

"Will my honoured kinsman bear with me, while I unfold what must be more painful for me to speak, than even for him to hear?"

"S'death man! do but speak out, and if thy words stretch me a corpse upon the earth, it will be better than this racking!"

"Your daughter "What of her?"

"Your daughter and Sir Baldwin Hercey are in the habit "

"Patience of heaven! did I ever dream to hear those two names coupled together again! —speak not,-breathe not, look not one more syllable!—It is enough, and more—oh death of my life! is it come to this?"

The old man dropped his staff, and staggered against the rough trunk of an immense elm. Supporting his shaking frame with one hand, with the other he motioned away Luke Tyler, who however advanced, seeing it was the time; and poured with ruthless pertinacity, his unwelcome information into the ears of the stricken and overpowered Franklin. But, I must speak, and you must HEAR! They have been in the constant habit of meeting under the great elm, by the bloody Templar's monument. I have myself often been privy to their interviews; and, unknown to them, I have still oftener watched them."

66

"And yet dared to conceal it from me?"

"Your pardon, sir!-I did but bide a fitting time. Mistress Floralice hath promised to fly with Baldwin Hercey this very night;-and, and-how could I see your child and your estates grasped by those hands, so redly gilded with Yorkist blood!"

"He dies for it!" shouted the Franklin.

"And which would scatter the treasure of your stuffed coffers, among the rallying and replenished ranks of Lancaster!"

"By the saint who distinguished my day of birth!-by that planet Saturn, the ascendant of my fortunes!—by light and darkness,-by hope and by despair,-by every oath that heaven records, and earth holds binding,- this Baldwin Hercey shall die the death! Have they met often? that I should ask! and thee!—but HAVE they often met?" "Nightly."

"And will, this evening, thou saidst, this very evening?"

"After moonrise."

"Then, of that moon let him make much, for sun I swear he never shall see more! But where bides he,-where tarries this skulking prowler about my fold ?"

"Sir Gerald Vernon, his father's ancient brother-in-arms, and, as thou knowest, much favoured by the King, although no friend to thee, holds him in high hospitality at Bilton Hall."

"Sir Gerald Vernon! doth he so?