To a girl, for the most part, the loss of a mother, before she has reached the years of discretion, is one never to be repaired, more especially where the surviving parent is so much occupied with duties, martial or civil, as to render his supervision of her bringing-up impossible. It is true that, in the age of which I write, the accomplishments possessed by the most delicate and refined of ladies were few and slight, as compared to those now so sedulously inculcated to our maidens, so regularly abandoned by our matrons; and that, at a period later by several centuries, he who has been styled, by an elegant writer,[3] the last of the Norman barons, great Warwick the Kingmaker, held it a boast that his daughters possessed no arts, no knowledge, more than to spin and to be chaste. [3] Sir E. Lytton Bulwer. Yet even this small list of feminine attainments was far beyond the teaching of the illiterate and warlike barons, who knew nought of the pen, save when it winged the gray-goose shaft from the trusty yew, and whose appropriate and ordinary signatures were the impress of their sword-hilts on the parchments, which they did not so much as pretend to read; and, in truth, the Kingmaker's statement must either be regarded as an exaggeration, or the standard of female accomplishment had degenerated, as is not unlikely to have been actually the case, during the cruel and devastating wars of the Roses, which, how little soever they may have affected the moral, political, or agricultural condition of the English people at large, had unquestionably dealt a blow to the refinement, the courtesy, the mental culture, and personal polish of the English aristocracy, from which they began only to recover in the reigns of the later Tudors. But in the case of the fair Guendolen, neither did the loss of her mother deprive her of the advantages of her birth, nor would the incapacity of her father, had the occasion been allowed him of superintending the culture of his child, have done so; for he was--at that day rarer in England than was a wolf, though literary culture had received some impulse from the present monarch, and his yet more accomplished father, Beauclerc--a man of intellectual ability, and not a little cultivation.