sentence, more creditable to the royal culprit's invention than to his justice. He appears to have been frequently ingenious in his judgments. A rich priest had seriously injured a poor shoemaker, and, for sole punishment, was condemned by the ecclesiastical tribunal to a few months' suspension from his sacerdotal functions. The shoemaker, deeming the chastisement inadequate, waylaid his enemy, and soundly drubbed him. Arrested immediately, he was condemned to death. He appealed to the king. The partiality of the ecclesiastical judges had excited some scandal; Don Pedro parodied their sentence by condemning the shoemaker to make no shoes for one year. Whether this anecdote be true, or a mere invention, it is certain that a remarkable law was added, about that time, to the code of the city of Seville, to the effect that a layman, injuring an ecclesiastic, should thenceforward be liable only to the same punishment that the priest would have incurred by a like offence against the layman. The murder of the Grand-master of Santiago, slain by his brother's order, and the death of the unfortunate French princess, who found a tyrant where she expected a husband, are recorded in the Romances of the Master Don Fadrique, and of Blanche de Bourbon. The fate of Blanche, attributed by contemporary chroniclers and modern historians to Don Pedro's orders, is one of the blackest of the stains upon his character. The poor queen died in the castle of Jerez--some say by poison, others by the mace of an arbalister of the guard. She had lived but twenty-five years, ten of which she had passed in prison. There is no appearance or probability that Maria Padilla instigated her assassination. That favourite was kind-hearted and merciful, and on more than one occasion we find her interceding with the king for the lives of his enemies and prisoners, and weeping when her supplications proved fruitless. The ballad makes free with fact, and sacrifices truth to poetry. It was dramatically correct that the mistress should instigate the wife's death. "Be not so sad, Doña Maria de Padilla," says the king; "if I married twice, it was for your advantage, and to show my contempt for this Blanche of Bourbon. I send her to Medina Sidonia, to work me a banner--the ground, colour of her blood, the embroidery, of her tears. This banner, Doña Maria, I will have it made for you:" and forthwith the ruthless arbalister departs, after a knight had refused to do the felon deed. "Oh France, my noble country! oh my Bourbon blood!" cries poor Blanche; "to-day I complete my seventeen years, and enter my eighteenth. What have I done to you, Castile? The crowns you gave me were crowns of blood and sighs!" And thus she laments till the mace falls, "and the brains of her head are strewed about the hall." The song-writer, amongst other liberties, has struck eight years off the victim's age, perhaps with the idea of rendering her more interesting. The exact manner of her death seems