College
and King's College, Cambridge, whose life ended in such tragedy towards
the close of the fifteenth century. His Queen is not mentioned from
beginning to end, and for this and other reasons I am inclined to
particularise still more, and conjecture that the period of which the
book treats must be prior to the year 1445 A.D., when the King married
at the age of twenty-three.

Supposing that these conjectures are right, the cardinal spoken of in
the book would be Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and cousin
of the King.

All this, however, must be doubtful, since the translator of the
original English or Latin appears to have omitted with scrupulous care
the names of all personages occurring in the narrative, with one or two
unimportant exceptions. We do not even know in what part of the country
Sir John Chaldfield held his living, but it appears to have been within
thirty or forty miles of London. We must excuse the foreign scribe,
however; probably the English names were unintelligible and barbarous to
his perceptions; and appeared unimportant, too, compared to the interest
of the mystical and spiritual experiences recorded in the book.

Of these experiences it is difficult to write judiciously in this
practical age.

Master Richard Raynal appears to have been a very curious young man, of
great personal beauty, extreme simplicity, and a certain magnetic
attractiveness. He believed himself, further, to be in direct and
constant communication with supernatural things, and would be set down
now as a religious fanatic, deeply tinged with superstition. His parson,
too, in these days, would be thought little better, but at the time in
which they lived both would probably be regarded with considerable
veneration. We hear, in fact, that a chapel was finally erected over
Master Raynal's body, and that pilgrimages were made there; and
probably, if the rest of the work had been preserved to us, we should
have found a record of miracles wrought at his shrine. All traces,
however, of that shrine have now disappeared--most likely under the
stern action of Henry VIII.--and Richard's name is unknown to
hagiology, in spite of his parson's confidence as regarded his future
beatification.

It is, however, interesting to notice that in Master Raynal's
religion, as in Richard Rolle's, hermit of Hampole, there appears to
have been some of that inchoate Quietism which was apt to tinge the
faith of a few of the English sol