rules and restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock
husband-no husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife,
she said; and spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to
record a promise or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that
the wishes should be heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man's
remaining one chance of happiness. On the theme touching her husband
Owain, it was verily to hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the
broader range, the rich interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit
past the flesh can find. Her mind was at the same time alive to our
worldly conventions when other people came under its light; she
sketched them and their views in her brief words between the gasps, with
perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as vividly as her twitched eyebrows
indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she read startlingly, if correctly.

Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a
drinking at the springs of life.

Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady
Fleetwood's consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months
old,--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord
had made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little
conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.

In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the
inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of 'the four and
twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned
green coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess
of Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the
Kentish gates of Esslemont,' has a foundation, though the story is not
the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,
printed when London's wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the
doings. of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly
depended on whispers.

Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds
of Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they
could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality,
to give the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard. London had
intimations of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them
in the interests of the national humour: which is the English way of
exalting to criticize, criticizing to depr