Other chapbook celebrities are MOTHER SHIPTON, Kentish Town, and Low Bridge, Knaresboro’; which latter village disputes with Shipton, near Londesborough, the honour of giving birth to this remarkable character in the month of July 1488. The fact is duly commemorated under her signboard in the former place:-- “Near to this petrifying wall[94] I first drew breath, as records tell.” Her life and prophecies have at all times been a favourite theme in popular literature. If we may believe her biographers, she predicted the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the dissolution of the monasteries, the establishment of the Protestant religion under Edward VI., the cruelty of Queen Mary, the glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth, the defeat of the Armada, the Plague and Great Fire, and many things not yet come to pass. Like the Delphic oracles, her predictions were given in metre, and veiled in mystery. The plague and fire, for instance, are thus foretold:-- “Triumphant death rides London thro’, And men on tops of houses go.” She is represented as of a most unprepossessing appearance; although we certainly might have expected better from the daughter of a necromancer, or “the phantasm of Apollo, or some aerial dæmon who seduced her mother;”--“her body was long, and very big-boned; she had great goggling eyes, very sharp and fiery; a nose of unproportionable length, having in it many crooks and turnings, adorned with great pimples, and which, like vapours of brimstone, gave such a lustre in the night, that the nurse needed no other light to dress her by in her childhood.”[95] Another necromancer, Merlin, shares renown with Mother Shipton, both in chapbooks and on signboards. MERLIN’S CAVE is the sign of a public-house in Great Audley Street, and in Upper Rosomon Street, Clerkenwell, in which places he doubtless still plays his old pranks, of changing men into beasts. Innumerable romances and histories of Merlin were printed in the middle ages. He appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth as early as the twelfth century, and Alain de l’Isle gave an ample explanation of his prophecies in seven books, printed in 1608. “This Merlin,” says M. de la Monnoye, “tout magicien et fils du diable que l’on l’a cru,” has by the good Carmelite, Baptiste Mantuanus, been metamorphosed into a saint. At the end of his “Tolentinum,” a poem in three books, in honour of St Nicholas, (anno 1509,) he thus speaks of Merlin:-- “Vitæ venerabilis olim Vir fuit et vates, venturi præscius ævi, Merlinus, laris infando de semine cretus. Hic satus infami coitu pietate refulsit Eximia superum factus post funera consors.”[96]