t your
Grace--so skilled in lance and horsemanship--preside at the lists?"

"Montagu, I love your brother well enough to displease my king. The
great earl shall not say, at least, that Richard Plantagenet in his
absence forgot the reverence due to loyalty and merit. Tell him that;
and if I seem (unlike Clarence) to forbear to confront the queen and
her kindred, it is because you should make no enemies,--not the less for
that should princes forget no friends."

Richard said this with a tone of deep feeling, and, folding his arms
within his furred surcoat, walked slowly on to a small postern admitting
to the river; but there, pausing by a buttress which concealed him till
Montagu had left the yard, instead of descending to his barge, he turned
back into the royal garden. Here several of the court of both sexes
were assembled, conferring on the event of the day. Richard halted at a
distance, and contemplated their gay dresses and animated countenances
with something between melancholy and scorn upon his young brow. One
of the most remarkable social characteristics of the middle ages is
the prematurity at which the great arrived at manhood, shared in its
passions, and indulged its ambitions. Among the numerous instances in
our own and other countries that might be selected from history, few are
more striking than that of this Duke of Gloucester, great in camp and
in council at an age when nowadays a youth is scarcely trusted to the
discipline of a college. The whole of his portentous career was closed,
indeed, before the public life of modern ambition usually commences.
Little could those accustomed to see on our stage "the elderly ruffian"
[Sharon Turner] our actors represent, imagine that at the opening
of Shakspeare's play of "Richard the Third" the hero was but in his
nineteenth year; but at the still more juvenile age in which he appears
in this our record, Richard of Gloucester was older in intellect,
and almost in experience, than many a wise man at the date of
thirty-three,--the fatal age when his sun set forever on the field of
Bosworth!

The young prince, then, eyed the gaudy, fluttering, babbling assemblage
before him with mingled melancholy and scorn. Not that he felt, with the
acuteness which belongs to modern sentiment, his bodily defects amidst
that circle of the stately and the fair, for they were not of a nature
to weaken his arm in war or lessen his persuasive influences in peace.
But it was rather that