The monastery thus founded had twenty-four Benedictine monks, and the church connected with it was consecrated "to the honor of God, the Virgin Mary, St. Peter, St. Osburg, and all the Saints." William of Malmesbury has incidentally mentioned its extraordinary ornamentation, declaring that "it was enriched and beautified with so much gold and silver that the walls seemed too narrow to contain it; insomuch that Robert de Limesi, bishop of the dio-miracle-plays. I must sum up in a few words cese, in the time of King William Rufus, scraped from one beam that supported the shrines 500 marks of silver."

the Penates, and conducted to her privy-chamber by Mercury; in the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with Tritons and Nereids; the pages of the family were converted into Woodnymphs, who passed from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawn in the figure of Satyrs.

playing." Gradually the Scriptural personages, the saints and angels, were put more and more in the back-ground, and the present royal personages more in the front; as, in another kind of art, the Venetian nobility were represented pictorially as Madonnas and Saints by the servile masters. And yet the dramatic Darwin of the future will no doubt trace Shakspeare's celebrations and representations of kings and The "Lady Godiva Pageant" which still linheroes back to these courtly interpolations on gers at Coventry, being one of three ancient the part of the Jeremys and Josephs for the pageants whose ghosts still haunt the England gratification of their royal patrons. Indeed Mr. of to-day, the other two being the Lord Mayor's Howard Staunton, the well-known Shakspearian and the Shrewsbury Shows, is certainly traceeditor and critic, has shown me several compara-able to the "mysteries" I have been describing. tive notes that he has made, indicating that I find in a Coventry book, the author's name I Shakspeare has used various expressions ex- do not know, a statement that there is one traplicable only by reference to the plays and dition in the city that when the monasteries shows of Coventry (a short distance only from were suppressed and the Catholic religion proStratford-on-Avon), which he must have seen, hibited, the plays and pageants for which the and which may have been the original means city had been so famous were continued as a of kindling his genius. In the time of Shaks- mockery. According to this account: peare, however, the "mysteries," or "miracleplays," had fallen more or less into desuetude, having been replaced considerably by "pageants" and "moralities."* The acting of religious subjects had been originally a real thing, and the people were solemnly impressed by the Bible stories which so few could read, and which were to them literally novels. But when they began to be patronized and appropriated by royalty, it became impossible that all the long speeches should be made or listened to. The characters were dressed up and paraded in costumes and attitudes along the streets when the kings and queens were to pass, or the play was thus transformed into the pageant.

And now came the Reformation, which swept the friars and their plays out of existence, burned vast quantities of "mystery" literature, a leaf of which could now bring any price, but which, after its first fury was past, really left the people of England very much the same as before. The passion for pageants was greater than ever before or since. All through the 16th century the chronicles are crowded with accounts of the pageants which attended every step of royalty. In these many of the personages of the "miracle" and "morality" plays-as King David, Moses, Justice, Truth, etc.-appeared in a kind of carnival. The age of Elizabeth was above all an age of pageants. Warton says that on account of the encouragement given by her to classical learning, the entire ancient mythology was wrought into spectacles for her honor. When she paraded through a country town almost every pageant was a pantheon: When she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, on entering the hall she was saluted by

"Theatrically considered, Mysteries' are dramatic representations of religious subjects from the Old or New Testament, or Apocryphal Story, or the Lives of Saints; Moralities' are dramatic allegories, in which the characters personify certain vices and virtues, with the intent to enforce some moral or religious principle. Moralities were of later origin than Mysteries, but they existed together, and sometimes each partook of the nature of the other."-Hone.

"A Naked Woman on horseback was introduced to ridi

enle the Sacred Host; immediately after her came a Merry Andrew, to divert the populace with profane jests; he was drawn in a kind of house on wheels, and from looking frequently out of the window, acquired the name of Peeping Tem; but one of these adventurers dying on leaving the house, no one could afterward be found with sufficient hardihood to follow his example, hence Peeping Tom ceased to form part of the Procession. Before the naked lady they placed a man in armor to represent St. George;

this gigantic figure was preceded by a group of men, in rusty bits of armor, as mock guards, and the procession closed with a burlesque against the Bishops and Clergy."

This tradition adds: "From this public profanation of sacred things the city of Coventry became so despicable as to give rise to the wellknown proverb of 'Sending a man to Coventry,'* which is to say, he is not worthy to be spoken to by men of reputation. As the inhabitants of Coventry have long been ashamed to acknowledge this as the origin of their splendid show, they esteem it more creditable to consider its celebration as a memorial of their gratitude to the Countess Godiva." I give, quantum valeat, this theory in which the Roman Catholic interest is very discernible, and which has a suspicious completeness, and proceed to discuss the probabilities in the case.

Only those who have particularly looked into the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can know how much of the trade of England in those days was carried on by means of Fairs. Steam and advertisements have done away with much of their importance, though they are still kept up with much spirit and with considerable profit to the neighborhoods in which they occur;

The following-which I find quoted without name in a Coventry Local Guide-seems to me a more probable account of this phrase: "The inhabitants of this inland city were formerly most decidedly averse to any correspondence with the military quartered within its limits. A female known to speak to a man in a scarlet coat became the object of town scandal. So rigidly indeed did the natives abstain from communication with all who bore his Majesty's military commission, that officers were here confined to the interchanges of the mess-room, and in the mess-room the term of sending a man to Coventry, if you wish to shut him from society, is supposed to have originated."

and who had sacrificed his eyes for them, and took care of him ever afterward!

But dismissing all later additions, what are we to conclude concerning the legend of Godiva itself? I find it very difficult to form a conclusion. There is hardly any legend which would more nicely call into play all the rules and principles of historic doubt and historic belief; and for this reason, apart from the intrinsic beauty of the story, the probabilities are worthy of being briefly balanced.

We have in favor of the truth of the story the facts that Earl Leofric did have a Countess of extraordinary public spirit; that he did, from being very exacting on the people, on a certain day give them the liberal charter which they now preserve; and that in the time of Matthew of Westminster-250 years after the alleged occurrence of the event-the local tradition was so strong as to have been commemorated in a stained window of Trinity Church. To these facts may be added the following probabilities: It is quite supposable that an Earl intending to emphasize his refusal of his lady's request should have lightly said that he would comply if she or so soon as she-rode naked through the town; and it certainly was in keeping with the chivalry of the time that if she had taken him at his word and complied with the condition, however lightly uttered, the Earl must have stood by his word. Moreover, if there had been any thing in the story essentially out of keeping with the age in which it is said to have occurred, Matthew of Westminster and Ingulph, who record it with evident credence, lived near enough to that age to have at least expressed some surprise at the incident, which they do not.

the mounted lady, the representative of the womanhood of England. That an Englishwoman should die for the people is imaginable; but hardly that she should ride through a city naked. But there is evidence, on the other hand, that in the eleventh century Coventry was preponderantly French. And what a difference is there between France and England in this matter! When an Englishwoman uttered the exclamation of her native land to Pauline Bonaparte, with whom she was looking at the picture for which the beautiful French Queen sat undraped

"How could you have borne the exposure!" --Pauline did but utter the reply of France when she naïvely answered, "It was not at all cold, I assure you." While Halliwell and others can not bring themselves to admit, whatever the evidence, that an exact representation of Adam and Eve on the stage could have taken place in England so late as the latter part of the sixteenth century, there is no doubt whatever that Moore, in "The Fudge Family in Paris," describes a spectacle which was drawing crowds to the Theatre Porte St. Martin in the gay capital so late as 1817:

"Here Begrand, who shines in this Scriptural path,

As the lovely Susanna, without e'en a relic
Of drapery round her, comes out of the bath

In a manner that, Bob says, is quite Eve-angelic!" But one need not go so far back to observe the differences of the two nations in the regard of nudity. Last year, when the Lord Chamberlain was carefully supervising Miss Menken's make-up as "Mazeppa" at Astley's, to see that she did not subvert the English Constitution by an over-liberal display, nearly every theatre in Paris was reviving some old "mystery," and Adam and Eve were reappearing with little more regard for the scruples of the present generation than is implied in "fleshes." Victor Hugo does indeed rather boast of the fondness of the French for nudity as "classic." The French foundation of Coventry, therefore, which has already been taken as explaining its freedom in the miracle-plays, may be regarded by those who believe in the legend of Godiva as sufficient to have rendered her undertaking possible, even though she was an Englishwoman; even as it is now observed that the English leave a good part of their squeamishness behind when they visit the Continent. But the original Frenchi

English historians are tender of local legends, and that concerning Godiva has not yet been reviewed from the skeptical side. Yet there seem to me several points in which it is vulnerable to the historic doubter. There is, in the first place, something very non-English in such an exploit. There is nothing more sacred in England than clothing. It is related that an Irishman once challenged a man to a duel for saying that he, the Irishman, had been "born without a shirt to his back." An Englishman would probably have been ready to settle on the field his claim to having been born in a full suit of clothes. Certainly there could be to the mind of an Englishman no disgrace comparableness of Coventry in monastic days might equally to that of nudity. The brother of Ophelia speaks as a true Englishman when he warns her that a woman must guard her charms even from the man in the moon. In Landseer's picture of Godiva exhibited in the Royal Academy this year, the Lady's elderly duenna is represented turning her head aside from the nude lady and shutting her eyes tightly. There is a look on this domestic's face which says plainly, "I wash my eyes clean of all such improper conduct; and before I would do such a thing every man, woman, and child in Coventry should be broken on the wheel!" Every one who looks at the picture smiles; but all see in her, rather than

well explain the character of the legend should it have been an invention, especially when it is considered how nearly it resembles the extraor dinary scene in the play of "The Creation."

There is another point that rather seems to indicate its growth out of the Eve of the play. "Eve" was always written in those days "Eva;" and I have found, in looking through many old chronicles, that Godiva was written "God-eva," which is simply "Good Eve." In the year 1494, during some popular agitations in Coventry concerning customs on wool and drapery, there were found nailed on the door of St. Michael's Church some doggerel verses, of which

I have seen a copy, and of which the first verse | thorities and of some of the old city guilds runs thus:

Be it knowen and understand,

This cite shoulde be free and nowe is bonde.
Dame good Eve made hit free,

& nowe yo custome for wolk & ye drap'ie."
This was incontestible evidence that the patron
saint of Coventry was at this period popularly
recognized as "good Eve." Was this only a
street pun on the name of "God-eva?" Or

had a "bad Eva," who had been up to a startlingly late period represented on the stage nude, and bringing woes upon mankind, suggested the invention of a "good Eva," who should bring blessings? Were this taken as pointing to a mythic origin for Godiva there would still remain to be accounted for the peculiarity, not likely to be a pure invention, that she rode on horseback. This may, indeed, have been borrowed from the style usual with the early pageants, in which nearly every character was mounted; or it may, indeed, have been a mere consequence of the fact that no locomotion except on horseback was supposed to be possible to a countess of those days.

I now take leave of antiquarian researches, and come to consider the Godiva of modern years.

There is no doubt whatever that the procession with the nude Godiva inaugurated, or revived from an older pageant, in the congenial age of Charles II., was repeated from year to year up to a period which can not be now fixed, but one certainly far later than would have been tolerated in any other part of Great Britain. This immunity of the Coventry Show was due to its being held up as a solemn act of homage to the heroic deliverer of the city. At length Lady Godiva hid herself from the gaze of (probably) the opening eighteenth century, and only now and then appeared, with rather sorry escort, until the early part of this century, when the procession was revived with considerable state and enthusiasm, with a Godiva clad in close-fitting cambric without a skirt, relieved by a variety of ornaments and a splendid gauze scarf suspended from her hair; she was also furnished with a great quantity of long, flowing hair. She was also, so late as 1829, accompanied by all the city authorities. The representation of that year (1829) produced a considerable revolution in Coventry, which resulted in a complete remodeling of municipal affairs in 1835. The city seems to have elected a reforming mayor in that year, who induced the corporation to a holy zeal, in the inspiration of which nearly all the antique articles which had been contributed by a succession of centuries were sold under the auctioneer's hammer, the effigy of Peeping Tom being alone left. And when, in 1836, the Procession was arranged, the town authorities, led by the mayor, refused to enter into it. So the people substituted for them various characters from history, which rather added to the interest of the Show in the popular estimation. The withdrawal of the town au

made the matter over to a class which was not likely to diminish any surviving prurience in the details of the pageant. And, as might be expected, gradually there arose a kind of civil word-war on the subject in Coventry. The dissenting preachers denounced the Show violently; the trades-people, and especially the publicans, maintained with vehemence a pageant which was the life and soul of their Fair, and which never failed to fill their pockets.

However, in the late exhibitions respectability began to show its superior power; and although huge posters scattered through Warwickshire allured the innumerable descendants of Peeping Tom to Coventry by bold promises, they generally found the performances disappointing. The public house keepers and others interested began, indeed, to fear that their show would cease to attract the crowd, and so, four years ago, they persuaded a model of the Royal Academy of London-Madame Letitiato veer a little toward the old style; but the fain descended on poor Godiva's linen skin, and it became necessary to prevent its becoming a too literal rendering of the legend by raising an umbrella over her, the anachronism of which was a more violent attack on the procession than the combined power of the pulpits could have wielded. Under the rain, the umbrella, and the laughter the handsome Madame Letitia wilted-swooned—and was taken from her cream-colored charger into a house.

Early in 1866 it was announced that there would be another Godiva procession. The Mayor decided not entirely to hold himself aloof from it. The dissenting preachers again began to appeal to the trades-people not to countenance or assist the matter in any form. Nay, this year they went so far as to put themselves in correspondence with her Majesty's Government; so that the Mayor received, one day, a letter from Sir George Grey, saying that he had reason to fear that Coventry was to be, on June 4, the scene of an immoral exhibition. Now it is perfectly true, that, within the circumference of a mile around the office of the Home Secretary in London, there are scores of ballet-dancers who would be hissed nightly if they were as much clad as the Lady of Coventry has been for twenty-five years; nevertheless, the Mayor assured Sir George that he would take care that every one in the procession should be “decently clad," though any advertisement of this contemplated decorum was carefully withheld.

St. Bartholomew's Fair survives now only in the picture George Cruikshank made of its last appearance-a stage covered with riotous, dancing men and women, contained in a vast skillet, whose handle the devil holds, regarding them hungrily as a mess for Tartarus. Mr. Hawthorne saw and graphically described the last Greenwich Fair which the authorities ever permitted to take place. The Croydon Fair has been reduced to half a dozen booths for beer-drinking.