Take breath, friend of mine, after the shadow of this great and much honoured Tudor magnate has passed across the screen of the past, dimly lit by the illumination of your thoughts,--for a broad and striking glimpse follows in his wake, of what we are sometimes apt to term the "good old times" opens upon us, as we rapidly picture the chief events that characterized the days of Thomas Arundell his second son, and the first of Wardour, and glance at his companions at the Courts of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., together with those of his immediate descendants in the succeeding reigns of the two last Tudor sovereigns. If those eventful times were not "good" in the large acceptance of the term, there was a large infusion of stern unflinching reality within them. The influence of strong mental power meets us everywhere, men aspired to be men,--sons of Anak in their resolutions,--and the views they took and combated for, were to them no myths,--nor did the almost absolute certainty of the fate of the martyr's stake, the headsman's block, or the confiscator's hand, if the enterprise should fail, deter or daunt an inflexible and often relentless purpose, dictated perhaps by the call of religious sentiment, or animated by the promptings of high personal ambition alone, or cast it may be, in the mould of real or imaginary patriotic duty. Contrasted with such, our puny doings of the present offer suggestive difference to the life-poised movements carried out by the deep-souled resolves that sustained the doings of the men, who passed through the grim ordeal of the blood-gripped days of Wolsey and Somerset,--some episodes of which, occurring during the reign of Henry VIII. and his son the boy-king, we propose lightly to glance at,--when the 'shapings' of the history of our native land lay in rather grander purpose than the now-a-day trivialities and companionship ravings of our modern political 'stump.' Sir John Arundell, of Lanherne, who died in 1545, by his first wife the Lady Elizabeth Grey, left two sons,--Sir John the elder, a country gentleman located at the old family seat of Lanherne, and Sir Thomas, ancestor of the Wardour descent, and the subject of our little story. Sir Thomas, born probably about 1500, was as a younger son sent early a-field to seek his fortune, and for that purpose introduced, it may be by his father, to the precincts of the Court of Henry VIII., where afterward he appears to have spent much of his time amid its phantasmagoria of pleasures and horrors, ecclesiastical, military, and civil. Beginning, if not exactly with actual attendance at the Court itself, but doubtless intended as a stepping-stone to it, we first hear of him as attached to the service of the next potential person of the realm, the subtle and ambitious Wolsey, in whose retinue he was appointed as one of the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber to my Lord Legate and Cardinal, with whom he was on friendly terms, and who probably brought him into notice.