As a boy of eight, however, a "gallant child, one that makes old hearts fresh," he may have stood by the roadside, or been perched on some friendly shoulder to add his shrill note to the loyal shout when the Queen rode by amid her retinue; and three years later, I warrant his quick wits found a way to see something of those glittering shows, those "princely pleasures of Kenilworth Castle," which lasted nineteen days and were the talk of the county. How eagerly his winged imagination would have responded to the Lady of the Lake, to Silvanus, Pomona and Ceres, to the "savage man" and the satyrs, to the "triton riding on a mermaid 18 foot long; as also Arion on a dolphin, with rare music"![6] If we did not think so much about Amy Robsart at Kenilworth as, according to Scott, we should have done, it is because we were unfortunate enough to know that she perished fifteen years before these high festivities,--three years, indeed, before the Castle was granted to Robert Dudley. Stoneleigh Abbey, with its tempting portraits, lay three miles to the left, and we would not swerve from our straight road, which, however, grew more exciting as we neared Warwick, for it took us past Blacklow Hill, to whose summit, six hundred years ago, the fierce barons of Edward II dragged his French favourite, Piers Gaveston, and struck off that jaunty head, which went bounding down the hill to be picked up at the bottom by a friar, who piously bore it in his hood to Oxford. We halted again at Guy's Cliff, constrained by its ancient tradition of Guy, Earl of Warwick, he who "did quell that wondrous cow"