wer, and the great gray mass of the
keep--all a fitting and impressive background to their bravery.

The gentlemen, in long coats of all wonderful colours and devices,
with little hats, jewelled and feathered, with boots to the knee of
soft leather, turned back in colours at the top; on their left hands
the thick hawking glove on which, jessed and hooded, sits the
hawk--for some who will not go with the hounds will fly the hawk on
the Isle of Purbeck.

[Illustration: {A man of the time of Henry VII.}]

Below, in the town over the moat, a crowd is gathered to see them
off--merchants in grave colours, and coats turned back with fur, their
ink-horns slung at their waists, with pens and dagger and purse;
beggars; pilgrims, from over seas, landed at Poole Harbour, in long
gowns, worn with penitence and dusty travels, shells in their hats,
staffs in their hands; wide-eyed children in smocks; butchers in blue;
men of all guilds and women of all classes.

The drawbridge is down, the portcullis up, and the party, gleaming
like a bed of flowers in their multi-coloured robes, pass over the
bridge, through the town, and into the valley.

The sun goes in and leaves the grim castle, gray and solemn, standing
out against the green of the hills....

And of Henry himself, the great Tudor, greater, more farseeing than
the eighth Henry, a man who so dominates the age, and fills it with
his spirit, that no mental picture is complete without him. His fine,
humorous face, the quizzical eye, the firm mouth, showing his
character. The great lover of art, of English art, soon to be
pulverized by pseudo-classic influences; the man who pulled down the
chapel at the west end of Westminster Abbey with the house by
it--Chaucer's house--to make way for that superb triumph of ornate
building, his chapel, beside which the mathematical squares and angles
of classic buildings show as would boxes of bricks by a gorgeous
flower.

The stories against him are, in reality, stories for him, invented by
those whom he kept to their work, and whom he despoiled of their
ill-gotten gains. He borrowed, but he paid back in full; he came into
a disordered, distressed kingdom, ruled it by fear--as had to be done
in those days--and left it a kingdom ready for the fruits of his
ordered works--to the fleshy beast who so nearly ruined the country.
What remained, indeed, was the result of his father's genius.

THE WOMEN

Take up a pack of cards and look at t