half blue velvet, embroidered with antelopes (the arms of the Bohun family), having large flowers springing between their horns. These trappings were afterwards utilised as copes for Westminster Abbey.

Lydgate, that Suffolk monk who suc ceeded Chaucer in the bede roll of English poets, wrote a poem (the authorship is not undisputed) on this day's celebrations. "Hail London!" he makes the king exclaim at the first sight of the red roofs, "Christ you keep from every care;" and the last verse of the quaint poem runs thus:

And at the drawbridge that is fast by
Two towers there were up'pight;
An antelope and a lion standing hym by,
Above them Saint George our lady's knight.
Benedictus they gan sing,

Quis venit in nomine domini, Gode's knight.
Gracias Dei with you doth spring,

Wot ye right well that thus it was

Gloria tibi Trinitas.

London Bridge, when the proud and ambitious cardinal assembled his archers at his Bankside palace, and attempted to storm the bridge.

The dangers of shooting London Bridge were exemplified as early as 1428 (in the same reign-Henry the Sixth). The barge of the Duke of Norfolk, starting from St. Mary Overies, with many a gentleman, squire, and yeoman, about half-past four of the bell on a November afternoon, struck (through bad steering) on a starling of London Bridge, and sank. The duke and two or three other gentlemen fortunately leaped on the piles, and so were saved by ropes, cast down from the parapet above.

Several Lollards' heads had already adorned the bridge, and in 1431 the skull of a rough reformer, a weaver of Abing; don, who had threatened to make priests' heads "as plentiful as sheeps' heads," was spiked upon the battlements. The very next year the child - king, Henry the Sixth, who had been crowned at Notre Dame in 1431, entered London over this bridge. Lydgate, like a true laureate, careless who or what the new king might be, nibbed his ready pen, and was at it again with appropriate verse. At the drawbridge there was a tower, he says, hung with silk and arras, from which issued three empresses, Nature, Grace, and Fortune.

And at his coming, of excellent beauty,
Benign of port, most womanly of cheer,
There issued out empresses three,
Their hair displayed, as Phoebus in his sphere,
With crownets of gold and stonès clear,
At whose out-coming they gave such a light
That the beholders were stonied in their sight.

With these empresses came fourteen crowned maidens, with blue baldrics, who presented the king with gifts, and sang a roundel of welcome.

If old London Bridge had a fault, it was, perhaps, its habit of occasionally partly falling down. This it did as early as 1437, when the great stone gate and tower on the Southwark end, with two arches, suddenly subsided into the Thames. There was another gala day for the bridge in 1445, when the proud and impetuous William de la Pole (afterwards Duke of Suffolk) brought over Margaret, daughter of René (that weak, poetical monarch, immortalised in Anne of Geierstein), as a bride for the young king of England, and the City welcomed her on their river threshold. The Duke of Gloucester, who had opposed the match, preceded her with five hundred men clad in his ducal livery, and with gilt badges on their arms, and the mayor and aldermen

rode on in scarlet, followed by the City companies in blue gowns and red hoods. Again Lydgate tuned his ready harp, and produced some certainly most unprophetic verses, in which he called the savage Margaret "the dove that brought the branch of peace,"

Resembling your simpleness columbyne.

In 1450, and the very month after Margaret's favourite, De la Pole, had been seized in Dover Roads, and his head brutally chopped off on the side of a boat, the great insurrection, under Jack Cade, broke out in Kent. tachment of the royal troops at Sevenoaks, After routing a deCade marched towards London, and the at Mile End, the City, after some debate, commons of Essex mustering threateningly admitted Cade over London Bridge. As the rebel passed over the echoing drawbridge, he slashed in two the ropes that supirritated at his robberies, barred up the ported it. Three days after, the citizens, bridge at night, and penned him close in his head-quarters at Southwark. The rebels then flew to arms-tried to force a passage, eventually winning the drawbridge, and burning many of the houses that stood in a close row upon it. Now the battle raged by St. Magnus Corner, now at the bridge foot, Southwark side, all the while the Tower guns thundering on the swarming maddened men of Kent. At nine the next morning, both sides, faint and weary, retired to their respective quarters. Soon afterwards Cade's army melted away, and Cade, himself a fugitive, was slain in a Kentish garden where he had hid himself, and his grim defaced head was placed on the very bridge gate on which he had himself but recently, in scorn and triumph, placed the ghastly head of Lord Round Cade's head, when the king reSay, the murdered Treasurer of England. entered London, were placed the heads of eight of his captains.*

At the entry of Edward the Fourth into London, in 1461, before his coronation, he the mayor and his fellows in scarlet, and passed over London Bridge, escorted by four hundred commoners, "well horsed and clad in green." In 1471, when Henry Falconbridge, one of the deposed king's was prisoner in the Tower, the Bastard of piratical partisans, made a dash to plunder

London. While three thousand of his men attacked Aldgate and Bishopsgate, the rest set fire to London Bridge, and burnt thirteen houses. But the citizens,

*See ALL THE YEAR ROUND, New Series, vol. iii. p. 181.

led by Ralph Jocelyn, a brave draper, made a gallant defence, drove off the filibusters, and chased them to Blackwall. In 1481, another house on the bridge fell down, drowning five of its inhabitants.

liam of Orange made him the first Duke of Leeds. This Sir Edward Osborne, the antiquaries tell us, lived at his father-inlaw's house in Philpot-lane, and was buried at St. Dennis, in Fenchurch-street. The Duke of Leeds still preserves, at Kiveton Castle, in Yorkshire, a fine portrait of Osborne's right-worshipful master, clad in black furred gown, scarlet doublet and sleeves, gold chain, and velvet bonnet. So, in many cases, the heraldic tree of our noblest peers has been grafted on the merchant's ink-stained deal desk.

In Queen Mary's reign there was again fighting on London Bridge. In the year 1554, when rash Sir Thomas Wyat led his four thousand Kentish men to London to stop the impending Spanish marriage, the rebel found the drawbridge cut away, the gates of London Bridge barred, and guns planted ready to receive him. Wyat and his men dug a trench at the bridge foot, and laid two guns. The night before Wyat retreated to Kingston to cross the Thames there, seven of his arquebusiers fired at a boat from the Tower and killed a waterman on board. The next morning the lieutenant of the Tower turning seven can non on the steeples of St. Olave and St. Mary Overies, the people of Southwark begged Wyat to withdraw, which he generously did.

The reign of Henry the Sixth brought more terrible trophies to London Bridge, for in 1496, Flamock, a lawyer, and Joseph, a farrier, of Bodmin, leaders of a great Cornish insurrection, contributed their heads to this decorative object. But Henry the Seventh was not half such a mower off of heads as that enormous Turk, his son, Henry the Eighth, who, what with the wives he grew tired of, and what with the disbelievers in his ecclesiastical supremacy, kept the headsman's axe very fairly busy. First came the prior and several unfortunate Charterhouse monks, and then the good old Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher. The parboiled head of the brave old man who would not bow the knee to Rimmon, was kept, so that Queen Anne Boleyn might enjoy the grateful sight. The face, for a fortnight, remained so ruddy and life-like, and such crowds collected to see the miracle, that the king, in a rage, at last ordered the head to be thrown down into the river. The next month came the head of a far greater and wiser man, Sir Thomas More. This sacred relic More's daughter, Margaret In Elizabeth's reign the bridge was reRoper, bribed a man to remove, and drop stored with great splendour. The City built into a boat in which she sat, and the head a new gate and tower three stories high was, long after, buried with her, under a at the Southwark end: a huge pile full of chapel adjoining St. Dunstan's, Canterbury. square Tudor windows, with a covered way The year 1536, following these atrocious below. About the same time was also cruelties, was the date of one of the most reared that wonder of London, Nonesuch interesting and one of the most authentic House, a huge wooden pile four stories legends connected with old London Bridge. high, with cupolas and turrets at each In this year the nursemaid of Sir William corner, brought from Holland, and erected Hewet, a rich cloth-worker living on the with wooden pegs instead of nails. It bridge, playing with her master's little stood over the seventh and eighth arches, daughter out of one of the projecting win- on the north side of the drawbridge. dows, let the child fall into the river. Its There were carved wooden galleries outinstant death seemed certain, when Edward side the long lines of transom-casements, Osborne, a brave apprentice of Sir Wil- and the panels between were richly carved liam's, leaped in and saved it. In due time and gilt. In the same reign Peter Moris, a the child so rescued grew into a blooming Dutchman, established a waterworks on the woman, and the belle of the bridge was north end of London Bridge, and, long becourted by many great courtiers, foremost fore this, corn mills had been erected at the among whom was the Earl of Shrewsbury. south end of the same over-taxed structure. But her father generously replied to all the The contemporaries of great Queen Bess saw amorous band, 'No, Osborne saved her, on the Traitor's Gate, among sheaves of and Osborne shall have her." So Osborne hangman's trophies, the head of the Irish bore away the belle, and with her a large Earl of Desmond and eleven standards dowry, and in course of years Osborne plucked from the Spanish Armada. In the became lord mayor, and was knighted by next reign, after the Gunpowder Plot, Queen Elizabeth. The great grandson of Father Garnet's head was added to the the brave apprentice was raised to the horrible collection on the bridge. peerage by Charles the Second, and Wil

In 1632, forty-two houses on the north

But, what help? Who would care twopence about a hesitating augury? Any man can say he "thinks." It seems to be accepted, as best, to adopt a bold, sonorous ring in these pronouncements, calculated at once to confound the sceptical, and awe into silence those more curious persons who would pry' into the sources of the seer's foreknowledge.

That not a few of these plungers into futurity have brought up pearls, is unde niable. In a former article we have and now, commencing with the remark already given some specimens of these, that no political inference whatever is intended to be suggested in the examples | that may be given, we propose to place before the reader certain other examples of authentic prophecies, which, in the whirli gig of time, have to all appearance reached their realisation, against all rational proba il bility, viewed from the prophet's time, that such would be the case.

We will have nothing to say, at present, to the too prolific seers-men who had a sort of flux of prophecy, and who, like Nostradamus, whose vaticinations embraced two thousand years, foresaw a confused assemblage of things, among which some children of the future were born sound and fair. The seer, in large practice, resembles | the fashionable physician, who, if he has more patients than his brethren, undoubtedly loses more. We will begin with the bards of small but distinct utterance, confident that what success has actually attended their foreshadowings will be a sufficient excuse for reproducing the little they as certainly did say.

Hungary as one vast field of carnage, prefiguring the insurrection in Posen, the devastations committed by the Prussians in suppressing it, and finally the downfall of European monarchies. The last portion was considered as realised by the events in Paris, following in the same year.

THE wholesome custom of, so to speak, checking man's current account with time, by summarising, at the close of every year, Germany is by no means deficient in the events that period has brought forth, seers. We will not dwell much upon presents other advantages beyond those of Joseph von Görres, whose death-bed prorefreshing the general memory, or aiding phecy, in January, 1848, was declared and the after historian. Affording the oppor- believed to have embodied the then undetunity of comparing what has actually hap-clared revolution in Poland, describing pened with what was confidently foretold, it imposes a healthful check upon man's arrogant judgment, and reminds him upon how minute a pivot the whole cycle of events may turn. If it be wise to call no man happy till he is dead, it is scarcely less prudent to be certain of nothing till it has come to pass. For, unless the eye of human prescience were microscopic, as well as farseeing, the whole prophetic structure must, of necessity, be at heart unsound, and, at all events, of no higher value than the testimony of a discreet witness, who swears to the best of his judgment and belief.” It is the common failing of our unaccredited seers to be rather too positive.

To the warning of events so near fulfil ment, it is impossible to accord the dignity of prophecy, and we record it only in deference to the remarkable sensation created by it in Germany at the time.

Jaspers, otherwise the "Westphalian Shepherd," testified in 1830.

See ALL THE YEAR ROUND, New Series, vol. iv. p. 132.