specimens of the great seals also of Henry III., and of his sons Edward
I. and Edmund Crouchback, and of the Tudor sovereigns, as well as many
private seals of great interest. The wax of the early seals was
obviously stronger and better than the wax since used. Of Elizabeth, who
came of the Butler blood through her mother, one large seal in yellow
wax, attached to a charter dated Oct. 24, 1565, is remarkable for the
beauty of the die. The Queen sits on the obverse under a canopy; on the
reverse she rides in state on a pacing steed as in her effigy at the
Tower of London. The seals of James I. follow the design of this die.
Two of these are particularly fine. At the Restoration something
disappears of the old stateliness. A seal of Charles II., of 1660, very
large and florid in style, shows the monarch sitting very much at his
ease, with one knee thrown negligently over the other. Many of the
private letters and papers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, during which Kilkenny, as it had been often before, was a
great centre of Irish politics and intrigues, have been bound up in
volumes, and the collection has been freely drawn upon by historians.
But it would obviously bear and reward a more thorough co-ordination and
examination than it has ever yet received.

There is a curious Table Book here preserved of Charles I. while at
Oxford in 1644, from which it appears that while the colleges were
melting up their plate for the King, his Majesty fared better than might
have been expected. His table was served with sixty pounds of mutton a
day; and he wound up his dinner regularly with "sparaguss" so long as it
lasted, and after it went out with artichokes.

An Expense Book, too, of the great Marquis, after he became the first
Duke of Ormonde, Colonel Blood's Duke, kept at Kilkenny in 1668 throws
some interesting light on the cost of living and the customs of great
houses at that time. The Duke, who was in some respects the greatest
personage in the realm, kept up his state here at a weekly cost of
about L50, a good deal less--allowing for the fall in the power of the
pound sterling--than it would now cost him to live at a fashionable
London hotel. He paid L9, 10s. a week for the keep of nineteen horses,
18 shillings board wages for three laundry-maids, and L1, 17s. 4d. for
seven dozen of tallow-candles. The wines served at the ducal table were
Burgundy, Bordeaux, "Shampane," Canary, "Renish," and Portaport, t