by Oldys.

[111] Lady Morgan's France in 1829-30.

CHAPTER XV.

THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD.

"Where are the proud and lofty dames,
Their jewell'd crowns, their gay attire,
Their odours sweet?
Where are the love-enkindled flames,
The bursts of passionate desire
Laid at their feet?
Where are the songs, the troubadours,
The music which delighted then?--
It speaks no more.
Where is the dance that shook the floors,
And all the gay and laughing train,
And all they wore?

"The royal gifts profusely shed,
The palaces so proudly built,
With riches stor'd;
The roof with shining gold o'erspread,
The services of silver gilt,
The secret hoard,
The Arabian pards, the harness bright,
The bending plumes, the crowded mews,
The lacquey train,
Where are they?--where!--all lost in night,
And scatter'd as the early dews
Across the plain."

Bowring's Anc. Span. Romances.

Romance and song have united to celebrate the splendours of the "Field
of the Cloth of Gold." The most scrupulously minute and faithful of
recorders has detailed day by day, and point by point, its varied and
showy routine, and every subsequent historian has borrowed from the
pages of the old chronicler; and these dry details have been so
expanded by the breath of Fancy, and his skeleton frame has been so
fleshed by the magical drapery of talent, that there seems little left
on which the imagination can dilate, or the pen expatiate.

The astonishing impulse which has in various ways within the last few
years been given to the searching of ancient records, and the
development of hitherto obscure and comparatively uninteresting
details, and vesting them in an alluring garb, has made us as familiar
with the domestic records of the eighth Henry, as in our school-days
we were with the orthodox abstract of necessary historical
information,--that "Henry the Eighth ascended the throne in the 18th
year of his age;" that "he became extremely corpulent;" that "he
married six wives, and beheaded two." Not even affording gratuitously
the codicil which the talent of some writer hath educed--that "if
Henry the Eighth had not beheaded his wives, there would have been no
impeachment on his gallantry to the fair sex."

But in describing this, according to some, "the most magnificent
spectacle that Europe ever beheld," and to others, "a heav