He loved truth above everything, and quite as intense was his hatred of quacks, pretenders, and those stupendous “shams” which have so often made eloquent and bilious the energetic Carlyle. He loved one thing with as strong a love as he felt for truth,—antiquarian pursuits. If ever old times should come round again, the Society of Antiquaries should feel themselves in duty bound to adopt him, properly authorized, as a patron saint; and appeal to him at much-perplexed meetings with a “Sancte Johanne de Stow, ora pro nobis!” to which he will doubtless answer “Sto, adjutorius!” What a sifter he was of old legends! And what truths he, after all, did save from much rubbish! How well he proved that the sword in the City arms was not there because of the Lord Mayor’s having struck down Jack Straw or Wat Tyler, but that it stood there as the Sword of St. Paul, in honour of the apostle. He swept away the fables of old London with herculean power, clearing them away as Niebuhr has those of ancient Rome, yet leaving nothing half so pretty in their place. He was the first who insisted that Richard the Third was by no means such a deformed fiend as he was painted by those who had written under his enemy Henry VII. and his successors. James IV. of Scotland owes it to Stow that his head found a burial-place, after a world of adventure quite enough to turn it. James the Fourth, as my readers doubtless remember, was slain in the fatal fight at Flodden Field. At the end of the day of bloody arbitrement there brought to a close, the body of the unlucky monarch was found among a heap of the fallen. The discoverers made prize of the corpse, wrapped it up in lead, and transmitted it as a thanksgiving offering to the monastery at Sheen, in Surrey. It was well taken care of by the honest people there as long as the monastery stood; but when the dissolution of these religious establishments took place, and the edifice was converted into a mansion for the Duke of Suffolk and his warm-hearted spouse, Mary, the sister of Henry VIII. and the widow of Louis XII. of France, the new occupants put their royal cousin’s body into a fresh wrapping of lead, and unceremoniously rolled it into an upper lumber-room. There it served for sundry vile purposes, until some rude workmen engaged in the house lopped off its head out of sheer wantonness. Their master, a glazier of Wood-street, Cheapside, anxious for as much of a king’s company as a glazier could possibly get, carried the head with him into the City. There, on the man of putty’s sideboard, the dried remnant of a crowned king, with its red hair and beard, and a “sweet savour” thence springing, was long the admiration of the glazier’s evening parties, and a never-ending subject of conversation for his guests. There Stow saw this skull of the anointed James, but at a time when the savour had ceased to be sweet, and when it had become a too familiar bore at the _soirées_ of its proprietor.