gundy, Tuscany, Crete, Greece; currants, raisins, almonds, from the Levant; tar and pitch from Norway; fur and amber from Russia; armour from Milan; cutlery from Sheffield; linens and lawns, diapers and holland from Bruges and Liege, Mechlin and Ghent; there was nothing that was not to be seen and bargained for at the worldfamous market.

And because of the vast congregation of people from all quarters, servants coming in the train of their masters, there were great facilities at such a fair for the organisation of discontent. Secret conferences could be held; notes of grievances compared; measures concerted; brotherhoods formed; signals and watchwords agreed upon.

One of the puzzles of the great Peasant's Rebellion of 1381, the magnitude of which is disguised when it is called Wat Tyler's, and spoken of as a mere impromptu expansion of a tax-collecting riot, is to understand how it was organised. It was really the greatest social convulsion that this kingdom has ever experienced, a widespread and deep-rooted rebellion compared with which all our other civil dissensions between barons and barons, York and Lancaster, king and parliament, Jacobite and Hanoverian, were superficial commotions. The great deeps of society were stirred as they had never been before and never have been since. The quickness with which the storm passed, the absence of visible result, the small space it occupies consequently in our histories have caused its stupendous violence to be forgotten. gathering at Blackheath under Tyler, the invasion of London by the mobs of Kent and Essex, was but part of a movement by which all England was thrown into momentary confusion. On the same day every town of consequence in England, north and south, east and west, York, Canterbury, Lincoln, Cambridge, Winchester, Bristol, Coventry, was assailed by the armies of the peasants, formidable though untrained. Every important town was as it were the centre of a circle in the circumference of which the insurgents gathered in bands, and converged along every radius, raising their comrades as they marched.

The

How was this simultaneous rising planned with such secresy and completeness, that on the appointed day all sprang into motion like automatons under the touch of a single hand? It was done at the fairs; the great national assemblies, the unconventional parliaments of the Middle Ages. Here leaders from all parts of the country could meet and make their arrangements. Once the organisation was begun, it could be completed by itinerant

friars, strolling minstrels, beggars and pilgrims, or conspirators travelling under those familiar figures, but it was at the fairs that the plans were first concocted, which were afterwards carried to such perfection.

After the rebellion, the government tried to check conspiracy by enacting that wherever six or seven peasants were seen in conference, it was the duty of loyal subjects to arrest them. But this was after they had shown themselves capable of combination. Before the rebellion, none of the ruling classes seriously believed in the possibility of combination among the despised rustics.

Still, when Burley knew that a man pretending to be a merchant, and known to hold revolutionary views, and to carry with him bundles of incendiary documents, was on his way to a gathering so crowded as Stourbridge Fair, he deemed it prudent to keep an eye on his movements; and he proposed to use Ralph Hardelot as a means for laying hands on him and his fellow conspirators, if he had any.

Was Ralph then already corrupted by royal favour? Was he so weak as to consent to play the spy upon the man who, from whatever motive, had helped to save his life?

No; the young man's loyalty was undoubtedly strengthened by the favour which the king had shown him. It was warmed to something like devotion. something like devotion. But the sagacious Burley knew human nature too well to propose to him the mission of a spy. It was only indirectly that he planned to learn something through Ralph of the movements of Simon d'Ypres, and to capture him and his whole gang if they seemed to meditate anything dangerous.

Ralph was to be sent to his acquaintance as a mediator, to assure him and his fellows that the king was most favourably inclined to them, was deeply sensible of the miseries of the poor commons, and ready to inquire into their grievances and redress them to the utmost of his power. Ralph was to seek the pretended merchant at Stourbridge Fair, and give him this assurance of the king's sympathy and goodwill.

This he could do most honestly, for had he not with his own ears heard the king declare that an inquiry was not too much to ask, and had the king not taken his own part in the quarrel with Rainham ?

Of Burley's ulterior designs the young man knew nothing and suspected nothing. He had found sympathy and help himself in high places, and had seen in the generous young king an eager disposition to extend the same to the poorest of his subjects. He was

THE mission with which Ralph was entrusted gave him the very opportunity that he longed for. His first step into the great arena had prospered beyond his most sanguine hopes. In this enterprise of reconciliation between hostile elements, he had not expected even to get audience of any man in power without long waiting and much importunity, and he had nerved himself to face patiently a protracted series of rebuffs. But already, without any effort of his own, he had been lifted to the very top of what he had expected to be a toilsome ascent: the king had heard him graciously; he was already the king's commissary, charged with a message of sympathy to the poor commons, bearing to their leaders an assurance of the king's willingness to redress their grievances. Ralph saw the hand of Providence in this rapid success, and though it made his heart glow and his head swim as with a sense of dizziness, he guarded himself firmly and prayerfully against the vanity of undue elation.

And in spite of the new strength breathed through and through him by his unexpected good fortune, he could not cast wholly out of his heart the trouble planted there by his meetings with Clara. The insidious adversary shifted ground and plied him with new casuistry.

Was there not a more excellent way towards the fulfilment of his vow than any he had yet conceived? To live in voluntary poverty; to distribute his rents among the poor; to go about among them in their wretched homes; to preach the rule of Christ to them in churchyard and market-place; to mediate between them and the careless rich; to exhort the powerful to amend their wrongs-these were the aims to which he had devoted himself. But was it necessary to cut himself off from woman's companionship? Could not these things be done better with woman's help? Could not the spirit of his vow be still better kept without strict adherence to the letter? With Clara's wealth added to his own, he could set a still

more signal example of just and merciful treatment of tenants. Example is better than precept. Well-spent wealth is better than patient poverty.

These thoughts ran through him in a flash, involuntarily, as if suggested by some power outside himself, and before he could confront and check them with the stern fact that Clara Roos was legally and ceremonially the wife of another. He crossed himself with horror, and violently repelled the temptation to apostasy.

From all the tumult and agitation of soul produced by the conflict between will and lingering desire, Ralph's main purpose gained greatly in motive force. Public spirit, zeal for the common good, is often reinforced in this way by personal feeling dammed up and denied free course in its natural channel. The energy thus engendered demands an outlet, and presses with powerful impulse behind any noble purpose in which the heart finds compensation. But to this end the old channel must be securely and resolutely closed. Fortune favoured Ralph also in his will to hold forward without looking back or turning aside.

It so happened that the Princess Joanna, the young king's mother, the widow of the Black Prince, interested herself warmly in Clara Roos. The Fair Maid of Kent had had her own love troubles, and affairs of the heart appealed to her. Only the year before she had favoured and had succeeded in effecting a love-match between her own daughter Maude, reputed the fairest lady in England, and a French prisoner, the young Count de St. Paul. Clara, wedded ceremonially to a brute whom she refused to acknowledge as her husband, interested the kind-hearted princess, and her interest took a practical form. She resolved to bring influence to bear on the Pope to procure a dissolution of the marriage.

But match-breaking without fresh matchmaking could interest no good-natured, motherly woman. Accordingly the princess's plans stretched farther. She had seen the manly young clerk, and she had seen how Clara looked at him. That wilful young woman could as a rule keep her own counsel well, but this secret, in the agitating scenes through which she had passed, it had been beyond her power to conceal from an observant eye with a sympathetic clue. princess had watched her face in the gallery when Ralph was questioned before the king, and again in the lists when his life was in danger.

The

But what were the young man's feelings? This also kindly curiosity prompted the

benignant princess to discover if she could. She sent her chaplain, Father William de Fulbourne, on a message of inquiry.

Now the chaplain, though a man of tact and discretion, had no great love for the disciples of Wycliffe, and there was a point in his interview with Ralph where this antipathy got the better of him. He was a friar of the Dominican Order, and friars of all the four orders were denounced by Wycliffe as Cain's kin, the children of Judas. Hence it was natural that he should find it hard to forego a chance of showing his contempt for the heretic.

The princess's first charge to him had been to assure Ralph of her personal sympathy with the poor commons, and to bid him convey this assurance to their leaders. It was her son's popularity that she had in view in sending this message, and the chaplain delivered it with gracious dignity.

Then the chaplain began to probe the young man gently on a more tender point, informing him of the princess's interest in Clara, and putting questions about her and the Knight of Sturmere. He mentioned as his reason for putting those questions that the princess was minded to procure a dissolution of the marriage.

" the

"You seem troubled, my son, chaplain said in a kindly tone. "Come, un

burden yourself to me. Confess. Do you

not love this lady? It may yet be lawful for you to love her."

"I did love her, father," answered Ralph hoarsely, "and it has been a hard struggle to forget her. I had forgotten. I could think of her calmly. My heart was at peace. But

now

"You have seen her again, and struggle is harder than before?

the

"It is harder. But I do not despair." "Be comforted, my son. The Church is lenient to those who do their utmost against sin. And it may yet be lawful. My lady is a gracious princess, and has set her heart on the removal of this impediment."

"It is impossible," said Ralph, in a firmer tone. Somehow the suggestion that had disturbed him so much when it came involuntarily from his own imagination, disturbed him less and was easier to resist when it came before him definitely from human lips. Why impossible?" asked the chaplain. "Much is possible to princes, when they move the Holy Father against what is in itself a scandal and a profanation."

66

"From rash vows," continued the chaplain, "made without the sanction of the Church, the Church will readily grant absolution on true repentance and due penance."

"Mine was not a rash vow," said Ralph gravely. The chaplain was unintentionally strengthening his resolution.

"I did not know," pursued the chaplain, "that your Master Wycliffe set much store by vows. by vows. He has disregarded his own lightly enough.

"Therein he is misjudged," said Ralph, and thereafter held his peace while the friar vented his anger against the heretic doctor. Master Fulbourne, though a hot-tempered man, was naturally gentle, and meeting with no resistance, he soon recovered his equanimity, and remembered that he had come as a friendly ambassador to the misguided youth.

"Peace be with you, my son," he said at length. "I am sorry that your obstinacy should cross the kind intentions of so gracious and benign a lady as the princess."

Ralph begged him to assure the princess. of his humble devotion and gratitude. Then as the chaplain was leaving, he preferred a hesitating but earnest request. Although, he said, he could not love this lady, he had the deepest concern for her welfare, and he knew of another, an honest gentleman, who loved her dearly, and might, if impediments were removed, pretend to her hand. This was his brother Reginald. If the princess could further his suit, it would be for the happiness of all.

All this was reported in time to Clara, whom the princess took into her train, and removed with her next day from Castle Hedingham. And how did Clara take Ralph's self-abnegation and earnest suit for his brother? She heard it all very demurely, but she was a wilful and tenacious person, and did not lightly abandon what she had set her heart upon. She laughed to herself in happy contentment when she was alone. It was clear that Ralph still loved her, however much he might struggle against it, and this was enough. Time would bring the rest.

THE foundations of the great English school of painting in water-colour rest on the practice of the miniaturists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as that, in its turn, reposes partly on the experience gained in the illumination of manuscripts, partly on the example of Holbein. Some day, when the history of British art comes at last to be written, it may be found that Hilliard, the Olivers, and their less remembered rivals, had a more continuous descent than we can at present allow from those early men on whom Vertue attempted to base his claim to priority in the revival of art for his countrymen. But as yet we must be satisfied with a less ambitious pedigree. We must be content to see in the chalk portraits of Holbein the exciting cause of the favour in which miniatures were held between the accession of Elizabeth and the death of Charles II., and in the experience of the illuminators, the storehouse to which the limners turned for their technical methods. For our present purposes Nicholas Hilliard may be taken as the founder of the whole school. Born at Exeter in 1547, he was the son of one Richard Hilliard, High Sheriff of Devon in the year that saw his son's thirteenth birthday. His

pedigree is given by Dallaway, and shows that, at least, on his mother's side, he was connected with that trade of goldsmith which has given so many painters to Christendom. To the same trade he was himself apprenticed, but his inclinations led him to a higher form of art. For painting, however, no master was then to be had in Devon, so Hilliard set himself to study the works of Holbein. How he then got at them it is difficult now to guess, but there is enough resemblance between his miniatures and the drawings at Windsor to preclude the notion of accident. That Hilliard, later in life, had abundant opportunities for studying these drawings, we know. He even compiled a body of critical notes upon them, of which use was apparently made by the author of a curious manuscript in the British Museum.1 But that he had access even in boyhood to examples of the Augsburg master's work in crayon, seems certain from his style in the earliest miniatures that have come down to "Holbein's manner of limning I have ever imitated, and hold it for the best," he wrote, and in his best works we find the pallid complexion and flat modelling to which 1 Harl., No. 6000

us.

the imitation of crayon drawings with brush and colour would pretty surely lead. Hilliard's fame was great in his own time. In an often quoted passage Dr. Donne expresses the common opinion when he says

a hand or eye By Hilliard drawn, is worth a history By a worse painter made."

Richard Heydock, in his translation of Lomazzo on Painting, published in 1598, says "Limnings, much in use in former times in church books, as also in drawing by the life in small models, of late years by some of our countrymen, as Shoote, Betts, &c., but brought to the rare perfection we now see by the most ingenious, painful, and skilful master, Nicholas Hilliard and his well profiting scholar, whose farther commendations I refer to the curiositie of his works;" and again "the perfection of painting in them is so extraordinary, that when I devised within myself the best argument to set it forth, I found none better than to persuade him to do it himself to the view of all men by his pen, as he had before unto very many by his learned pencil, which in the end he assented to; and by me promiseth a treatise of his own practice that way with all convenient speed." This treatise Hilliard wrote, so that his name must be entered among those of the earliest English writers on art, as well as among the pioneers of practice. Hilliard's vogue lasted to the end of his life. His favour was great with Elizabeth and greater still with James. From both he had, for a time, the exclusive right to portray the royal visage. Mary Stuart, too, he painted, though where the sitting took place it is hard to say, and few of the more important courtiers at the end of the sixteenth century failed to test the powers of his squirrel brush.

For Hilliard painted with a pinceau fait des poils de la queue d'un escureuil,1 on tablets of pecorella (abortive vellum), backed with cardboard. These he seems to have prepared according to a method described by Peacham as that of one Hippolito Donato, a famous Roman miniaturist. On a card rubbed down with pumice-stone, a sheet of pecorella of the required size was pasted with fine starch, and then pressed and polished for use. The backing to Hilliard's miniature of Elizabeth, now in the National Portrait Gallery, is a playing card-the Queen of Hearts.

Hilliard died in the first week of 1619, and was buried in St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. Walpole declares our gratitude is chiefly due

1 Blaise Vigenere.

to him for what he did to form Isaac Oliver. The latter, however, does not seem to have been very long with Hilliard, for he worked for a time under Zucchero, and Vertue even believed he had studied in Italy. But the reasons for that belief are far from conclusive, while the mere absence of evidence on the point leaves but little doubt that Oliver never made a journey, which was a great undertaking in his time, and for a man of his station. As to another doubtful point in Isaac's biography, such evidence as there is seems about equally divided. Was he English or French? Was his name Oliver or Olivier? In his will he spells it English fashion; on his drawings, French. At Caen, in Normandy, one Pierre Olivier, painter, was living in 1517, but Hondius, Sandrart, and all other foreign writers who mention Isaac, call him English, while a historian (Burton) of Leicestershire says: "Of this family (Oliver), settled at East Norton, in 1570, was Isaac Oliver, the curious limner, as I have heard." However this may be, Isaac was in art the heir to Hilliard. His method was the same, although his miniatures are far richer in colour, and more solid in effect than his master's. He painted, too, occasionally, in oil, "drew histories in small," and wrote upon his art. As a rule he signed his work with a monogram identical with the Greek, but on the splendid little full length of Lord Dorset, at South Kensington, he writes his name in full, Latinised thus, Isaac Olivierus fecit, as if he were more than usually proud of his performance, as well, indeed, he might be.

Isaac Oliver died in Blackfriars, in 1617, aged sixty-one or sixty-two, and one feels inclined to say--was succeeded, like a king. by his son Peter. Peter was a more prolific, and, in some ways, a less borné, master than Isaac. Walpole says he was accustomed to make replicas of all his works for his own

use-a laborious habit to which he often did honour, no doubt, by the breach of it. Like Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, Peter worked much for the Court. During "the troubles," the miniatures he produced for Charles I. and his courtiers were dispersed. At the Restoration, Charles II., who remembered the beauty of Peter's art, wished to possess some of his things, but for a time could not come at them. At last he was told by one Rogers that both father and son were dead, but that Peter's widow was living at Isleworth, and was rich in his works. Charles went incognito, with Rogers, to see them, and to buy if possible. Mrs. Oliver refused to sell, declaring she meant the King to have the first