500 
meet them, claim the reverence due 
to a long line of ancestry, unsullied 
by those crimes which too frequently 
stain the annals of contemporaneous 
houses, fortunate also in their political 
career, though the male line has sur- 
vived in baronial rank for upwards of 
seven centuries. Neither treasons nor 
attainders haye eyer clouded their splen- 
dour, nor have they bedewed the boards 
of a scaffold with their blood ; yet by no 
means exempt from those miseries 
which flesh is heir to, calamities of a 
domestic nature were the portion of the 
individuals who escaped violent death 
upon the battle field, the honourable 
yet untimely end which laid many of the 
Talbots prostrate. The title of Earl 
was granted in the reign of Henry VI. 
to the gallant commander in the French 
wars, who with his brave son fell before 
the walls of Bourdeaux, We are told 
that the herald of the glorious veteran 
sought out the body amongst heaps of 
slain; wept over it, and embraced it 
with these pathetic words: “ Alas ! my 
Lord, and is it you?—I pray God, par- 
don all your misdoings! I have been 
your officer at arms forty years and 
more; itis time that Ishouldsurrender to 
you the ensigns of my office.”” With these 
words, and with the tears gushing from bis 
eyes, he threw his coat of arms over the 
corpse: thus performing one of the 
ancient rites of sepulchre. The sixth 
Earl of Shrewsbury, who received Poult- 
ney-Inn from the hands of the youthful 
monarch Edward, was so singularly un- 
fortunate in his matrimonial connexion 
with the widow of three husbands, Ro- 
bert Bewly, Sir William St. So, and Sir 
William Cavendish,* that the Bishop of 
Litchfield and Coventry, writing to the 
Earl, in 1590, comforts him with this 
* This lady, surviving the Earl of Shrews- 
bury, became'a fourth time a widow. In 
early life she had been very beautiful, and 
accustomed to adulation, which her riches 
purchased for her after her charms had fled. 
She was most unwilling to leave her vast 
possessions in. this world for an uncertain 
portion in the next; and clinging with 
fruitless tenacity to life, she consulted 
soothsayers respecting the term of her 
existence. They assured her that she 
should not die’ whilst she continued to 
build ; and we are informed that Chatsworth 
owes its origin ‘to’ this prediction: ‘“ The 
juggling fiend, who keeps the word of pro- 
mise to the ear and breaks it to the mind,” 
played his usual trick; ‘the lady resigned her 
breath during a hard frost, in which the 
masons were prevented from working; at 
least, so says the tradition. 
Walks in London,—The Monument. 
[ Nov. J, 
remark: “It is a common jeste, yet 
trewe in some sence, that there is but 
one shrewe in all the worlde, and everee 
man hath her.” This nobleman was 
one of the most upright, as well as the 
most able, statesmen of his age ; he was. 
of the council of Queen Mary, and ex- 
hibited an instanee, remarkable in those 
days of jealousy and distrust, of equal fa- 
vour from her suecessor, who chose him 
to fill the same station, and afterwards 
appointed him: to the dangerous office 
of holding Mary of Scotland in custody. 
Though he may thus be said to have 
guided three females, nay, three queens, 
he was unequal to the government of a 
fourth, and he to whom the proud 
daughters and the niece of Henry VIII. 
submitted their judgment at least, was 
subject to the intolerable caprice of an 
ambitious and self-willed woman, who 
not content with having induced him te 
settle vast property on the children of 
her third husband, the Cavendishes, to 
the prejudice of his own, meddled with 
state -affairs, and boldly released him 
from his superintendance of the captive 
princess, by a real or feigned complaint 
of jealousy, a measure which might 
have cost the Earl his, head. - But the 
history of the Talbots, duringsuccessive 
reigns, presents only a struggle: of jar- 
ring interests between husband and wife. 
The life of the-seventh Earl was em- 
bittered by the interferenee of his Coun- 
tess in the affairs of the unfortunate 
Arabella Stuart. -The-son of the tenth 
Earl was killed by the King’s side at the 
battle of Marston Moor, and Francis, 
Earl of Shrewsbury, in the reign of 
Charles -II., whilst vindicating his -in- 
sulted honour, fell in a duel with the 
Duke of Buckingham, a meeting -at- 
tended with so many shameful cireum- 
stances on the part of the licentious fa- 
vourite and the equally abandoned 
woman, whose conduct. brought. her 
husband to the grave, that delicacy 
recoils from. the narrative. ~The con- 
templation of misery hiding. its wrinkled 
front under the embroidered robe, the 
certainty that no rank nor station) will 
shield us from the visitation of evil, 
may well reconcile: us. to the : petty 
troubles which we encounter in our 
pilgrimage on earth. Even whilewe gaze 
on the record of frail, mortality, the 
spot once inhabited. by princes) and by 
nobles, time steals away,a) portion: of 
our existence, and whilst the; dead ap+ 
pear to be sinking into deeper: oblivion, - 
the distance which separates us) is 
shortened, R.- 
