pole-axes. No wonder choleric Harry soon
grew jealous of such a rival!

Ipswich can boast of very old houses. The
Grammar School was once the refectory of a
Dominican friary, built in the reign of Henry
the Third. The brick town-hall was once part
of St. Mildred's Church, erected in 1449. The
Tankard public-house was once the mansion of
Sir A. Wingfield (temp. Henry the Eighth). The
archdeacon's house, near St. Mary-at-Tower,
was built in 1471, the very year of Wolsey's
birth. Sparrow's House, says Mr. Walcott, an
excellent judge of these matters, is a fine
specimen of domestic architecture of Charles
the Second's reign, and in the side streets
through which the Orwell crescents there are
many fine old Tudor buildings, and none finer
than "the Old House," now a bookseller's,
which is very quaint, with its carved panels,
pilasters, and brackets.

  AN ELIZABETHAN ADVENTURER.

ADVENTURES were to the adventurers in
Queen Elizabeth's time in the largest sense of
the words. The British subject of those days,
who left his native shores, had no occasion to
seek for exciting incidents to give colour to his
travel. They crowded on him thick and fast,
crossing his course in rapid succession, and now
and then crushing a hapless wayfarer remorselessly
out of existence. To danger and difficulty,
however, stubborn Englishman opposed
daring and enterprise, and followed fortune
where he listed. Wild spirits carried their
turbulence from home to expend it in fighting
the Spaniard "beyond the tine," or in sharing
the perils of a continental campaign. Treaties
might be made between London and Madrid,
but there was no peace then, nor for many a
day afterwards, on "the Spanish Main," where
"gentlemen adventurers" fought stoutly on
their own account, sometimes for honour, but
always for gold. Chronic war is the phrase,
perhaps, which best describes the state of
Europe. There was always fighting in one
quarter or other sufficient to give occupation to
the wandering apprentices of the trade of arms.
The Mediterranean was infested by Mahommedan
rovers, who strove earnestly to give the
sea-going Christian an opportunity of varying
his experiences by a probation of slavery. All
beyond the Mediterranean and Central Europe
was a terra incognita, shrouded in dim haze,
and peopled by the popular imagination with
strange and uncouth forms. These were the
days when Prester John had an acknowledged
existence somewhere in Africa, or Asia—
authorities differed; when the great Cham of Tartary
was a mighty potentate; when Golconda had
store of diamonds; when the loadstone mountain
of eastern seas drew the iron bolts out of
ships; and when the "voyages of Sindbad the
Sailor" would have been accepted by the mass as
truthful narratives of discovery and adventure.

Several of the obscurer English, who wandered
beyond their island limits at this period,
set the example, since too faithfully followed,
of rushing into print with accounts of their
wanderings. But, unlike most of their modern
imitators, the Elizabethan travellers had stories
worth telling. Some of the narratives are
of considerable interest in themselves, and
derive more from the quaint simplicity of their
narrators. One of these, which was very
popular in the author's lifetime, bears the
title almost a story per se "The rare and
most wonderful thinges which Edward Webbe,
an Englishman borne, hath seene and passed
in his troublesome trauailles in the citties of
Ierusalem, Damasko, Bethelem, and Gallely:
and in the landes of lewrie, Egipt, Gtecia,
Russia, and in the land of Prester John.
Wherein is set foorth his extreame slauerie
sustained many yeres togither in the gallies
and wars of the great Turk against the lands
of Persia, Tartaria, Spaine, and Portugall,
with the manner of his releasement, and
comming into Englande in May last" [1589].
In the course of these long wanderings and
vicissitudes, Webbe inevitably saw much that was
strange and beyond the experience of the
narrow home life; and what he saw he tells roundly.

The traveller, who was born at "St. Katharine's,
neere the Tower," in 1554, was the son of
Richard Webbe, master gunner of England.
His father's influence procured the younger
Webbe, at the early age of twelve, a post in
the train of Captain Anthony Jenkinson, on
the third mission of that officer as ambassador
from England to Russia. In this service he
resided "some space in the head cittie of Russia,
called Musko," and began those observations of
men and manners which he committed to the
press in the leisure of after life. He particularly
notes that the Russians "are a kind of tyranous
people, as appeareth by their customs," one of
the latter being a pleasant fashion of punishing
debtors by a daily infliction of blows "on the
shinnes or on the foreheade" with a wooden
mallet. A ready mode of getting rid of peers
who made themselves disagreeable to the
sovereign is thus described: "I also noted that
if any nobleman do offend ye Emperor of
Russia, the saide nobleman is taken and
imprisoned with al his children and kinsfolkes,
and the first great frost that commeth (for the
cuntrey is wonderfully cold, and subject to
much frost) there is a great hole made in the
ise over some great river, and then the partie
principal is put in, and after him his wife, his
children, and all other his kinsfolkes, and so
leave none of his posteritie to possesse his lands
or goodes, but the same are bestowed uppon
others at the emperor's pleasure."

While Webbe was in Moscow in attendance
upon Captain Jenkinson, the city was besieged
and taken by the Crim Tartars, into whose
hands the English lad fell in the confusion
consequent upon the assault, and was carried by
his captors into slavery in the Crimea. In this
wretched thraldom, where he was literally a
hewer of wood and drawer of water, beaten
thrice a week with a "horse-tayle" a curious
but characteristically Cossack instrument of