Normandy and Guienne, the chivalrous king
gathered together in 1450 his one thousand five
hundred sail, his six thousand men-at-arms, his
twenty-four thousand archers, and Nym,
Bardolph, and Pistol. Shakespeare has given a
splendid panorama of the scene:

        Suppose that you have seen
    The well-appointed king at Hampton pier
    Embark his royalty; and his brave fleet
    With silken streamers the young PhÅ“bus fanning.

        O, do but think,
   You stand upon the rivage, and behold
    A city on the inconstant billows dancing;
    For so appears this fleet majestical,
    Holding due course to Harfleur.

It was just at starting that the discovery took
place of the conspiracy which Shakespeare has
also dramatised. The king's cousin Richard,
Earl of Cambridge, had conspired with Henry's
favourite councillors and companions, Sir
Thomas Grey and Lord Scrope of Masham, to
ride to the frontiers of Wales, and there
proclaim the Earl of March the rightful heir
to the crown of Richard the Second, if that
monarch were really dead, which some still
doubted. The three conspirators were all
executed, and their bones lie in the chapel of the
Domus Dei, an ancient hospital in Winkle-street.

Bevis Mount, just outside Southampton, was
the residence of Lord Peterborough, the general
who drove the French out of Spain in the War
of the Succession, and the steady friend, first
of Dryden, then of Pope, Swift, and all their set.
He spent the latter part of his stirring life at
his "wild romantic cottage" with his second
wife, Anastasia Robinson, a celebrated singer,
whom for a long time his pride forbade him
to publicly acknowledge. Pope often visited
him here, particularly in the autumn of 1735,
just before the earl started for Lisbon, in which
voyage he died. Pope pays the veteran several
compliments, talks of his gardening, and his
taming

    The genius of the stubborn plain
    Almost as quickly as he conquer'd Spain.

The poet also describes the Spanish flags and
trophy guns which the eccentric old general
had arranged over his garden-gate.

Peterborough travelled so furiously fast, that
the wits said of him that he had talked to more
kings and more postilions than any man in
Europe; and Queen Anne's ministers used to
say that they always wrote at him, not to him.
Swift has sketched him with kindly sarcasm:

    Mordaunt gallops on alone;
    The roads are with his followers strewn;
    This breaks a girth, and that a bone.

    His body, active as his mind,
    Returning sound in limb and wind,
    Except some leather lost behind.

    A skeleton in outward figure,
    His meagre corpse, though full of vigour,
    Would halt behind him, were it bigger.

    So wonderful his expedition,
    When you have not the least suspicion,
    He's with you like an apparition.

That excellent little man, Dr. Isaac Watts, is
also one of the prides of Southampton, having
been born at a small red-brick house (21,
French-street), in 1674. His father, a humble
schoolmaster, had suffered much for his
nonconformity; and once, when her husband was in
prison, the wife was seen sitting on a stone
outside the door, suckling little Isaac.

From Southampton to the New Forest's
sixty-four thousand acres, is a mere flap of the
wing to the crow at his best speed. The beech
glades, alive with countless squirrels, the
ridings echoing with the swift hoofs of half-
wild ponies, the great arcades of oak-trees lie
before him. It was long supposed that this wild
district was first turned into hunting ground
by William the Conqueror. According to one
old chronicler the savage Norman, "who loved
the tall deer as if he were their father," and
made it a hanging matter to kill a stag,
destroyed fifty-two mother churches and effaced
countless villages, in a space thirty miles long:
but this is untrue. It is true that thirty
manors around Lyndhurst, in the green heart
of the forest, ceased to be cultivated;  but the
Gurths and Wambas, the serfs, and thralls,
and villains were not driven away. The only
two churches mentioned in Domesday Book—
Milford and Brockenhurst—still exist; and,
indeed, immediately after the afforestation, a
church was built at Boldre, and another at
Hordle. The real grievance, therefore, with
the Hampshire Saxons, thirteen years after the
Conquest, was the placing a larger district
than before under the cruel Norman forest law.
The deaths in the forest by chance arrow
wounds of Rufus, the Conqueror's youngest son
Richard, and also of an illegitimate son of
Duke Robert, were looked upon by the Saxon
peasants as the result of divine vengeance.
There are no red deer now in the forest, as
when Mr. Howitt wrote his delightful sketches
of the scenery, and saw, "awaking as from a
dream, one deep shadow, one thick and
continuous roof of boughs, and thousands of
hoary boles, standing clothed, as it were, with
the very spirit of silence." The stirrup
of Rufus still hangs in the Queen's House at
Lyndhurst. The moat of Malwood Keep,
where Rufus slept the night before his death,
can still be traced near Stony Cross, on the
Minstead road. The cottage of Purkiss, the
charcoal-burner who found his body, is still
shown to those who care to believe in it.
Through Boldre wood, Rufus and the hunters
rode on the day when Tyrrell's arrow flew
awry. Away above Sopley, on the main road
from Christchurch to Ringwood, is Tyrrelsford,
where the frightened French knight forded
the Avon on his way to Poole, to embark for
Normandy; and close by the ford stands the
forge of the blacksmith who shoed Tyrrel's
horse. The fugitive is said to have slain this
blacksmith to prevent his prating of such a
horseman's having passed that way.

At Lymington—close to which is Baddesley,
where, in the last century, a groaning elm for
a year and a half caused much superstitious
excitement—the crow, refreshed by a blue