THE "FOX" blade to the Richard II. sword. This was done by order of the mayor in 1734. The blade has on it the orb and cross mark and also the running wolf—a fourteenth century German mark—but so common was it on the foreign blades used in England in the sixteenth century that, the figure being taken for a fox—as wolves were not then common in England—the term "Fox" was transformed to the sword; hence in Shakespeare's "Henry V." act iv., scene 4, we have Pistol saying to his French prisoner on the field of battle:—
"O Signieur Dew, thou diest on point of fox."
and in one of Webster's plays we have—
"Of what a blade is't?
A Toledo or an English fox?"
The two finest churches in Lincoln were at one time St. Swithun's and St. Botolph's. The former was burnt down, but, after a century, was rebuilt badly, but has now been restored by the munificence of Messrs. Clayton and Shuttleworth to its former grandeur, and has a really fine tower and spire, designed by Fowler, of Louth. St. Botolph's, near the south "Bargate," had to endure a similar period of decay, but was at last resuscitated, the south aisle being the last gift to the town of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth.
Lincoln's last new building, the Carnegie Library, designed by Mr. Reginald Blomfield, stands in St. Swithun's Square. It was opened on February 24th, 1914.
Two other houses are interesting because of their inmates in the eighteenth century; one the old Jacobean mansion of the Bromheads of Thurlby, whose descendant, Captain Gonville Bromhead, won with Lieutenant Chard undying fame by the defence of Rorke's Drift in the Zulu War, 1879. The other is a house called Deloraine House, in which once lived George Tennyson, grandfather of the poet; and we cannot quit Lincoln without going to see the fine bronze statue of the poet by G. F. Watts, which stands in the close at the east end of the cathedral.
In the autumn of 1909 the centenary of the poet's birth was celebrated at Lincoln. Dean Wickham preached an eloquent sermon to a large congregation in the cathedral nave, after which, the choir, leaving the cathedral, grouped themselves round the statue and sang "Crossing the Bar," and Bishop King gave
