erings:

'Mark the _year_, and mark the _night_,
When _Severn_ shall re-echo with affright
The shrieks of death thro' Berkeley's roofs that ring,
Shrieks of an agonizing king.'

How different is the imagery when Richard the Second is described;
and how indistinctly is the luxurious monarch marked out in the form
of the morning, and his country in the figure of the vessel!

'The swarm that in thy noontide beam were born?
Gone to salute the rising morn.
Fair laughs the morn,' etc.

The last prophecy is that of the civil wars, and of the death of the
two young princes. No place, no name is now noted: and all is seen
through the dimness of figurative expression:

'Above, below, the rose of snow,
Twin'd with her blushing foe, we spread:
The bristled boar in infant gore
Wallows beneath the thorny shade.'"

Hales remarks: "It is perhaps scarcely now necessary to say that the
tradition on which _The Bard_ is founded is wholly groundless. Edward
I. never did massacre Welsh bards. Their name is legion in the
beginning of the 14th century. Miss Williams, the latest historian of
Wales, does not even mention the old story."[1]

[Footnote 1: The _Saturday Review_, for June 19, 1875, in the article
from which we have elsewhere quoted (p. 79, foot-note), refers to
this point as follows:

"Gray was one of the first writers to show that earlier parts of
English history were not only worth attending to, but were capable of
poetic treatment. We can almost forgive him for dressing up in his
splendid verse a foul and baseless calumny against Edward the First,
when we remember that to most of Gray's contemporaries Edward the
First must have seemed a person almost mythical, a benighted Popish
savage, of whom there was very little to know, and that little hardly
worth knowing. Our feeling towards Gray in this matter is much the
same as our feeling towards Mitford in the matter of Greek history.
We are angry with Mitford for misrepresenting Demosthenes and a crowd
of other Athenian worthies, but we do not forget that he was the
first to deal with Demosthenes and his fellows, neither as mere names
nor as demi-gods, but as real living men like ourselves. It was a
pity to misrepresent Demosthenes, but even the misrepresentation was
something; it showed that Demosthenes could be made the subject of
human feeling one way or another. It is unpleasant to hear the King
whose praise it was that

'Velox e