Romance and song have united to celebrate the splendours of the "Field of the Cloth of Gold." The most scrupulously minute and faithful of recorders has detailed day by day, and point by point, its varied and showy routine, and every subsequent historian has borrowed from the pages of the old chronicler; and these dry details have been so expanded by the breath of Fancy, and his skeleton frame has been so fleshed by the magical drapery of talent, that there seems little left on which the imagination can dilate, or the pen expatiate. The astonishing impulse which has in various ways within the last few years been given to the searching of ancient records, and the development of hitherto obscure and comparatively uninteresting details, and vesting them in an alluring garb, has made us as familiar with the domestic records of the eighth Henry, as in our school-days we were with the orthodox abstract of necessary historical information,--that "Henry the Eighth ascended the throne in the 18th year of his age;" that "he became extremely corpulent;" that "he married six wives, and beheaded two." Not even affording gratuitously the codicil which the talent of some writer hath educed--that "if Henry the Eighth had not beheaded his wives, there would have been no impeachment on his gallantry to the fair sex." But in describing this, according to some, "the most magnificent spectacle that Europe ever beheld," and to others, "a heavy mass of allegory and frippery," historians have been contented to pourtray the outward features of the gorgeous scene, and have slightly, if at all, touched on the contending feelings which were veiled beneath a broad though thin surface of concord and joy. Truly, it were a task of deep interest, even slightly to picture them, or to attempt to enter into the feelings of the chief actors on that field.