d piety; the body being taken in a hearse from St. Mary's near the
castle, to his collegiate church as he directed, "without the pomp of
armed men, horses covered, or other vanities"--and the rank of the
deceased alone denoted by the magnitude of five tapers, each weighing one
hundred pounds, and fifty torches.

The buildings of the Newark continued nearly in the state already
described till the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538, when Robert
Boone the last dean, terrified by the power of the tyrant Henry, and
alarmed by the unjustifiable rigours of the king's commissioners,
surrendered his house and received with the rest of his brethren,
trifling pensions for life, from this period the buildings of the college
being unsupported by any fund sunk into decay, or were applied to
purposes widely different from the intention of the founders. The
church, cloysters, and gate-way are entirely removed, with the exception
of two arches of the vault under the former, which are still to be seen
firm and strong in a cellar of the house, now a boarding school.

The old hospital itself seems also to have been infected with the
contagion of ruin, for tho' spared by the rapacious hand of Henry, the
number of poor in the house 64 men and 36 women, are reduced from their
original allowance of seven pence weekly, to the now scanty stipend of
two shillings, which arises from the rents of lands and tenements in
Leicester, and its vicinity. The house has been reduced to its present
form by contracting the dimensions of the old one; for that standing in
need of considerable repairs, his present Majesty, to whom, as heir to
the dutchy of Lancaster, the expensive privilege of repairing it belongs,
gave the produce of the sale of an estate at Thurnby in this
neighbourhood, which had escheated to the crown, for that purpose.

At the east end is a small chapel in which prayers are read twice a day,
and where some mutilated monumental figures, probably of the Huntingdon
family, are still to be seen.

Nothing farther remains to be noticed concerning this interesting part of
the town, except that the south gateway was beaten down by the king's
forces at the storming of the place in the spring of the year 1645, when
they left only a part of the jamb on the eastern side standing. One of
the prebendal houses on the west side of the antient quadrangle of the
college has, within these few years, been purchased for the vicarage
house of St. Mary'