H

were

&

bo All things,” says our Chronicler, then found in confusion; many poor lackwits had made themselves great possessions with the ownerless riches of those who had perished. Troops of dissolute creatures went rioting and carousing from house to house. Revenge and Hatred had a carnival, and honest men were missed that died not of the plague, but by the knife of the irresponsible assassin. Some thought the angel of the second vial more awful than he that went before; and there was a fear in sad minds as if chaos were come again, and the elements of society so sundered as to be never more conjoined. Thus it was, that those men of the Earl of Lincoln's hall, dreadless of justice, carried their prisoner to Windsor; and with certain of their cup-fellows in the king's household, woful proof of the universal lawlessness! laid him fast in the royal castle, even while the king, with the remnants of the court, was there deploring the desolation

1

which had so laid waste his once fair and well

ordered kingdom."

Rothelan being thus imprisoned in Windsor Castle, and believing for his old trea son, the revival of which he attributed to the malice of his uncle, began to fret and complain of his hard fortune, and the suf ferings to which, without offence, his noble mother had been so long consigned. But the plump heart of youth soon rejects sorrow. As the morning brightened, and the goodly prospect of woodlands and fields be low his window opened to the rising sun, his stormy passions subsided into a serene resolution to sustain his fate as became a soldier. Even this, as the day advanced, is described by our author as yielding to gentler thoughts -the remembrance of the hopes he had che rished amidst the revels and the banquetings; and, as usual, when he fell into that soft and placid mood, his fancy flowed into melody,

Ad lib.

wish, as the beam on the blossom, And fan-cy but

While he was thus singing, and his spirit rising into more happy reflections, he heard the window of the chamber above suddenly opened, and in a moment after the delightful voice of the Lady Blanche calling him by name. But love-feasts at windows have been rendered stale by that of Romeo and Juliet, and, therefore, though our author's, with its impassioned flights and flashes of joyous tenderness, far excels, we shall not extract it; neither how the lovers congratulat ed one another on having escaped the plague wishing, in the same breath, that they had both died, since cruel destiny forbade their love." But much as the Lady Blanche rejoiced in the safety of her lover, her pleasure was not a

little saddened by the circumstances in which she had found him. Her feminine ingenuity, however, soon discovered what had not occurred to him, that the mysterious manner in which he had been brought to Windsor did not look much like a seizure for treason; and she suggested for his consolation, that in all probability her father or Lord Suffolk had some hand in the conspiracy.

"But," said she, "I will inform the king, who hath been much disquieted concerning you; for, last night, a servant, who was supposed to have fallen in battle with your fa ther, arrived from Scotland, and is gone to London to ascertain your fate."

In this manner was Rothelan informed of Hubert Neville's return, on the morning of the same day that he so avengingly visited Sir Amias, the sequel of whose machinations we shall now proceed to narrate.

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