To pierce with spear, eke with my cruel sword
To part his neck, and with his head to board,
Invested with a royal paper crown,
From place to place to bear it up and down.

But cruelty can never 'scape the scourge
Of shame, of horror, or of sudden death;
Repentance self that other sins may purge
Doth fly from this, so sore the soul it slayeth;
Despair dissolves the tyrant's bitter breath,
For sudden vengeance suddenly alights
On cruel deeds to quit their bloody spites_.

The only contribution to this earliest form of the _Mirror_ which is
attributed to an eminent writer, is the "Edward IV" of Skelton, and
this is one of the most tuneless of all. It reminds the ear of a
whining ballad snuffled out in the street at night by some unhappy
minstrel that has got no work to do. As Baldwin professes to quote
it from memory, Skelton being then dead, perhaps its versification
suffered in his hands.

This is not the place to enter minutely into the history of the
building up of this curious book. The next edition, that of 1563,
was enriched by Sackville's splendid "Induction" and the tale of
"Buckingham," both of which are comparatively known so well, and have
been so often reprinted separately, that I need not dwell upon them
here. They occupy pp. 255-271 and 433-455 of the volume before us. In
1574 a very voluminous contributor to the constantly swelling tide of
verse appears. Thomas Blener Hasset, a soldier on service in Guernsey
Castle, thought that the magisterial ladies had been neglected, and
proceeded in 1578 to sing the fall of princesses. It is needless to
continue the roll of poets, but it is worth while to point out the
remarkable fact that each new candidate held up the mirror to the
magistrates so precisely in the manner of his predecessors, that it
is difficult to distinguish Newton from Baldwin, or Churchyard from
Niccols.

Richard Niccols, who is responsible for the collection in its final
state, was a person of adventure, who had fought against Cadiz in the
_Ark_, and understood the noble practice of the science of artillery.
By the time it came down to him, in 1610, the _Mirror for Magistrates_
had attained such a size that he was obliged to omit what had formed
a pleasing portion of it, the prose dialogues which knit the tales in
verse together, such pleasant familiar chatter between the poets as
"Ferrers, said Baldwin, take you the chronicles and mark them as they
come," an