“Eh!--What!”--said I, starting up and shaking myself, “drowsy, did you say? Oh no! Heaven defend that I should be drowsy, when a gentleman of your inveterate learning and lungs condescends to give me a lecture! I was, indeed, for a moment thinking of the Chinese devotee who vowed never to sleep at all, and so cut off his eyelids: but I never slept, my ancient; I never winked over your homily, though I would fain have you come to your nineteenthly, lastly, and to conclude. However, whilst we live we must drink, and so here’s to your reformation, friend Postern. Now, by St. Thomas of the Bridge!” ejaculated I, as I took up the tankard, “you’re either a wizard, Master Barnaby, or else this tankard hath no bottom; and, truly, it’s the first time I ever saw wine keep hot on a mahogany table.” “Fancy, Mr. Geoffrey, mere fancy,” replied the placid old man with a shrewd smile; “but even as it is, it will serve as a good prelude to some of the more amusing scenes with which the fragments of Bridge history furnish us in the sixteenth century. Indeed, all I have been able to lay before you are but fragments: cyphers which derive their value by connection, and look considerable only by their number. “It was then in the year 1526, when Cardinal Wolsey was meditating a marriage between King Henry VIII., and the Duchess of Alençon, that his adversaries had anxiously contrived for him to be despatched on an embassy to France, in order to remove him from about the throne, or, at the least, to weaken his power. On July the 26th, the Cardinal left England, and in that extraordinary and entertaining piece of biography, called ‘_Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey_,’ we have a particular account of the grand procession in which he rode through the City to cross London Bridge, on his road to Dover. The best edition of this work is, past question, that by Samuel Weller Singer, Esq., 1825, octavo, 2 volumes; in the first of which, at page 86, you may see an engraving of the Cardinal’s progress, from a Manuscript in the possession of Francis Douce, Esq., and read the passage I have alluded to in the following words. ‘Then marched he forward out of his own house at Westminster, passing all through London, over London Bridge, having before him of gentlemen a great number, three in a rank, in black velvet livery coats, and the most part of them with great chains of gold about their necks. And all his yeomen, with noblemen’s and gentlemen’s servants following him in French tawny livery coats; having embroidered upon the backs and breasts of the said coats these letters: T. and C., under the Cardinal’s hat. His sumpter mules, which were twenty in number and more, with his carts and other carriages of his train, were passed on before, conducted and guarded with a great number of bows and spears. He rode like a Cardinal, very sumptuously, on a mule trapped with crimson velvet upon velvet, and his stirrups of