"Rowe," continues Pennant, "has flung this part of her sad story into the following poetical dress; but it is far from possessing the moving simplicity of the old historian."[35] Submissive, sad, and lonely was her look; A burning taper in her hand she bore; And on her shoulders, carelessly confused, With loose neglect her lovely tresses hung; Upon her cheek a faintish flush was spread; Feeble she seemed, and sorely smit with pain; While, barefoot as she trod the flinty pavement, Her footsteps all along were marked with blood. Yet silent still she passed, and unrepining; Her streaming eyes bent ever on the earth, Except when, in some bitter pang of sorrow, To heaven she seemed, in fervent zeal, to raise, And beg that mercy man denied her here. "The poet has adopted the fable of her being denied all sustenance, and of her perishing with hunger, but that was not a fact. She lived to a great age, but in great distress and miserable poverty; deserted even by those to whom she had, during prosperity, done the most essential services. She dragged a wretched life even to the time of Sir Thomas More, who introduces her story in his Life of Richard the Third. The beauty of her person is spoken of in high terms; 'Proper she was, and faire; nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you would have wished her somewhat higher. Thus sai they that knew hir in hir youth. Albeit, some that now see hir, for she yet liveth, deem hir never to have been well visaged. Now is she old, leane, withered, and dried up: nothing left but shrivelled skin and hard bone; and yet, being even such, whoso well advise her visage, might gesse and devise, which parts how filled, would make it a faire face.'"[36] To these pictures, which are all drawn with spirit, may be added a portrait in the notes to Drayton's _Heroical Epistles_, referring to the one by Sir Thomas More. "Her stature," says the comment, "was mean; her hair of a dark yellow, her face round and full, her eye grey, delicate harmony being betwixt each part's proportion, and each proportion's colour; her body fat, white, and smooth; her countenance cheerful, and like to her condition. That picture which I have seen of her, was such as she rose out of her bed in the morning, having nothing on but a rich mantle, cast under her arm, over her shoulder, and sitting in a chair on which her naked arm did lie. What her father's name was, or where she was born, is not certainly known; but Shore, a young man of right goodly person, wealth, and behaviour, abandoned her bed, after the King had made her his concubine."[37]