having considerable point, have come down to us, but nothing that makes us believe that he possessed any showy or attractive qualities. Courage-courage in the highest degree-combined with judgment and honesty in the exercise of it, are the strong foundations upon which his character mainly rests. Mr. Dixon, as we have frequently remarked, is an able and vigorous writer, but his perpetual striving to invest what he writes about with a kind of romantic interest, and his strong political prejudices, render his books extremely defective. The present volume

is more open to objection on both these points than his Penn. His style is easy, graphic, forcible, and picturesque, and will always command attention; but we fear that English history will lose a great deal of the advantage which it would otherwise derive from his energetic labours, if he does not learn to control his genius in the particulars we have pointed out. His powers are of a high order, but to do good they must submit to be restrained by a stedfast adherence to plain unvarnished fact.*

THE sepulchral monument here represented, though in some respects peculiar, is perhaps less remarkable in itself than for the legendary stories that have been built upon it, and for the attention it has received from several of our by-gone antiquaries. It was first noticed by Weever, in his Funerall Monuments, in the following terms (edit. 1631, p. 549; edit. 1767, p. 316):

"Burnt Pelham.

"In the wall of this church lieth a most ancient monument: a stone whereon is figured a man, and about him an Eagle, a Lion, and a Bull, having all wings, and a fourth of the shape of an Angell, as if they should represent the four Evangelists: under the feet of the man is a crosse fleurie, and under the crosse a serpent. He is thought to have been some time the lord of an ancient decaied house, well moated, not farre from this place, called, O Piers Shoonkes. He flourished Ann. à conquestu vicesimo primo."

The monument is not noticed by Sir Henry Chauncey, the first historian of the county; but Mr. Nathaniel Salmon, in his History of Hertfordshire, fol. 1728, for the sake of "a little amusement," entered into a longer discussion upon the subject than we can afford

He says,

to extract entire. "The figure is such as I should have expected for the founder of a church, fitted to lie in the nich of a wall, as many founders do." He suggests that it may have belonged to the more ancient church, which stood before the fire in Henry the First's reign, which gave the parish its name of Brent Pelham; adding that "the nich it lies in now is an old door-place." Yet he afterwards conjectures that the monument is no older than the son of a man who lived in the reign of Edward the First. One Gilbert Sank occurs in the Exchequer rolls as suffering a distress, made by his feudal lord Simon de Furneaux, at Pelham Arsa in 16 Edw. I. and that Gilbert, he suggests, might be the father of Piers; and if, instead of " anno a conquestu 21" we were to read 221, "it suits well enough with the distress to a year. And who knows but Peter might recover the right the very same year his father lost it?"

Who knows? Such conjectures might be more "amusing" to Mr. Nathaniel Salmon than they could prove edifying to his readers, and his conjectural emendation was after all rather hastily made, as, though it

was calculated to meet Weever's date, it could not so readily coincide with the direct assertion of the inscription, which stated that O Piers Shonkes "died anno 1086." Salmon appears, however, to have made a probable guess at the author of that inscription. He says, "The writing is said to have been done by a vicar about 100 years ago, perhaps the long-lived Keen." This was Raphael Keen, who died in 1614, after having been Vicar of Brent Pelham for the very extraordinary period of 75 years and six months, that is, from a period antecedent to the Reformation. That the re-erection of the monument was the act of this

venerable parson, is very probable indeed, for the tomb is of brick-work; the style of its construction and of the arch above is Elizabethan; and so are the lines, both Latin and English.* The whole is evidently of post-Reformation arrangement; and where the grave-stone lay before it was raised on the altar-tomb, one may conjecture, but, as Mr. Salmon would have said, -who can tell?

Mr. Salmon "asks permission to finish this nisi prius argument with the relation given me by an old farmer in the parish, who valued himself for being born in the air that Shonk breathed. He saith, Shonk was a giant that dwelt in this parish, who fought with a giant of Barkway named Cadmus, and worsted him; upon which Barkway hath paid a quit-rent to Pelham ever since. So that Horace's rule is at Pelham still observed

Aut famam sequere, aut sibi convenientia finge."

So much for the pleasant fooling of Master Nathaniel Salmon. It has already been seen that there was a family resident at Pelham named Sank or Shonk; and it is evident that the fame of one of them, which lingered about his old moated manor-house, was connected by the villagers with this sculptured gravestone. "There stands," says Salmon, a barn upon some

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ground moated in, called still by the name of Shonks Barn. Shonks pays castle-guard to the bishop at Stortford. There is another place called Shonks on the edge of Harlow in Essex."

The monument was noticed by Mr. Gough in his Sepulchral Monuments, vol. i. p. 89; by Mr. Brayley in the Beauties of England and Wales (Hertfordshire, 8vo. 1808); in the Antiquarian Itinerary, Sept. 1816, with an engraving from a drawing by F. W. L. Stockdale (the description being that of Brayley repeated); and by Mr. Clutterbuck, in his History of Hertfordshire, vol. iii. p. 451. Mr. Gough contents himself with repeating the statements of former writers; Mr. Brayley terms the design a "symbolical representation of the triumph of Christianity;" and Mr. Clutterbuck does little more than Mr. Gough, except that he adopts Salmon's sugges tion that the stone "was removed from the chancel of the old church, which was burned down in the reign of King Henry the First." He adds, however, a note of the circumstance that one Peter Shonke occurs as a witness to a deed dated at Clavering in Essex in the 21 Edw. III.

Mr. Brayley gives another version of the legendary stories of the villagers, that "this symbolical representation of the triumph of Christianity was probably the origin of a traditional tale concerning the person buried here, and which represents him as having so offended the devil by killing a serpent, that his Highness threatened to secure him, whether buried within or without the walls of a church; to avoid which, he was deposited in the wall itself." Mr. Brayley adds, that, "Whatever might have given rise to the tradition, it would seem that O'Shonkes was a character much venerated, as the buttresses on the outside of the churches, which formed the place of his sepulture, are marked with crosses; but if such crosses are to

be seen without the church, are they not those which have been left at the solemnity of consecration, which are sometimes still to be discovered in such positions?

After all, there is no great mystery in the design represented on the gravestone. The upper portion exhibits, as Weever says, the symbols of the four evangelists; but the figure in the centre of them is not a man; it is an angel bearing to heaven the soul of the deceased, which is represented in the ordinary medieval way, as a small naked human being, with his hands in prayer, carried in a sheet. In the centre of the stone is a quatrefoil flower, which might be supposed to be nothing but mere ornament; but if taken in connection with the other flower, which pierces the serpent's head (though they are not absolutely united), it may be regarded as a variety of the cross-flory, and so far (as Mr. Brayley described it) as a symbolical representation of the

triumph of Christianity-a variety of the same symbol which was usually exhibited in the images of St. Michael, St. George, and St. Margaret. It is, in fact, a modification of a common form of Early-English foliage, here used to engraft the cross upon the dragon; and from the character of this portion of the design its date may be placed about A.D. 1200-1225. See Mr. Boutell's comprehensive work on "Christian Monuments," in which this monument at Brent Pelham receives a passing allusion at pp. 77, 104.

The drawings from which the present engravings have been taken were made by the late Thomas Fisher, esq. F.S.A. whose services as a draughtsman to the ecclesiastical antiquities of Bedfordshire are well known. In the churchyard at Oakley in that county he found a sculptured coffin-lid of a similar though less elaborate design, the cross-flory of which is fixed on a monster of a singular variety of form, as here represented.

CLE CHOM

IT is exactly twelve hundred and fifty years ago since Clotaire the Second compounded for the commission of "sins he was inclined to," by erecting on the shores of the sea at Boulogne, a little church (which bore no comparison with the amount of its founder's failings), in honour of our Lady, and the royal builder's own and unusual liberality. The liberality was of a very equivocal character it must be confessed, for the rough monarch robbed his subjects of the money wherewith he sought to illustrate the intensity of his own religious feelings.

The edifice was raised, but for upwards of a quarter of a century its chief glory, or rather what should have been its chief glory, was wanting. The chapel, or church, contained no counterfeit presentment, no eikon, of the sacred object_especially sought to be honoured. Connected with this want was the determination of the King to erect no image over the altar he had raised that bore not with it warrant of a speaking likeness" of the original. The consummation so desired was not compassed in the lifetime of Clotaire. 66 Dagobert of the

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