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BOOKS AND READING

BY HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE

THE PASSING OF THE MIDDLE AGES

With Henry VII, who came riding into London wearing dead Richard of Gloucester’s crown on his head, modern England may be said to have had its beginning. For now printing was coming into general use, gunpowder was being employed in warfare, and religious freedom was dawning in men’s minds, faint as the earliest Mush that ushers in a June morning. The homes of the people, all save the highest in the land, were still wretched enough from our point of view. Fires were built against the walls of the stone cottages, and the smoke found its way out as best it might; the furniture was of the roughest description, a log of wood served as a pillow, and under the rushes that strewed the clay floors the rubbish accumulated for months, assisting the spread of the plagues and pestilences that swept the whole known world from time to time. But people were beginning to plant carrots, salads, and other vegetables, and the great lords were forbidden to keep huge retinues of paid retainers, to do whatever wild bidding their captains might order. These thousands of men, deprived of the chance to sit about, weapon in hand, idle and vicious but well fed and watched over, were forced to go to work to earn their bread in peaceful ways, and industries began to flourish.

Henry VII does not appear to have made a striking impression on the romance writers however, possibly because he was rather a dry, cold, avaricious kind of king, under whom the country prospered, but who was neither picturesquely wicked nor admirably good.

Frank Cowper wrote a good story set in the early years of this reign, called “The Captain of the Wight.” There is plenty of stir and adventure to the pages, and quite a feeling of the times. And there are two books about The Fortunes of [[Q549757|]], a remarkable impostor who claimed to be a son of one of the little Princes in the Tower, murdered by wicked Richard. But Perkin asserted that the elder had escaped and lived to become his father, and that Perkin was, therefore, a Plantagenet, and rightful heir to the throne,

You can fancy that this created tremendous excitement, and the book “A Trusty Rebel,” by Mrs. H. Clarke, gives us Perkin at his best, making all England hum with his goings-on. Mrs. Shelley has also made this bold adventurer her hero in her story of the same period, “Perkin Warbeck.” You ought to be able to find one of these books.

The last years of Henry’s reign, with the young Prince Henry as the hero, are told of in E. Everette Greene’s book
From photograph by Franz Haufstanengle..
Henry VIII
From the painting by Holbein. “The Heir of Hascombe Hall.” There are some fine scenes in the south of England and in London. A book that takes up the tale about where Greene drops it is “The Arrow of the North,” by R. H. Foster (Long, 1906). This is a rousing tale, full of adventure, that you will be sure to enjoy, and it is laid in other sections of England, so that the two pretty well cover the island from the latter part of the fifteenth century on to 1513.

If the English of the sixteenth century had been as fond of giving their kings nicknames as were their ancestors, the Saxons, Henry VIII would probably have been called the Magnificent. A strapping big fellow he was, and how he loved

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