This made me with my bloody dagger wound
    His guiltless son, that never ’gainst me stored;
  His father’s body lying dead on ground
    To pierce with spear, eke with my cruel sword
    To part his neck, and with his head to board,
  Invested with a royal paper crown,
  From place to place to bear it up and down.

  But cruelty can never ’scape the scourge
    Of shame, of horror, or of sudden death;
  Repentance self that other sins may purge
    Doth fly from this, so sore the soul it slayeth;
    Despair dissolves the tyrant’s bitter breath,
  For sudden vengeance suddenly alights
  On cruel deeds to quit their bloody spites_.

The only contribution to this earliest form of the Mirror which is attributed to an eminent writer, is the “Edward IV” of Skelton, and this is one of the most tuneless of all.  It reminds the ear of a whining ballad snuffled out in the street at night by some unhappy minstrel that has got no work to do.  As Baldwin professes to quote it from memory, Skelton being then dead, perhaps its versification suffered in his hands.

This is not the place to enter minutely into the history of the building up of this curious book.  The next edition, that of 1563, was enriched by Sackville’s splendid “Induction” and the tale of “Buckingham,” both of which are comparatively known so well, and have been so often reprinted separately, that I need not dwell upon them here.  They occupy pp. 255-271 and 433-455 of the volume before us.  In 1574 a very voluminous contributor to the constantly swelling tide of verse appears.  Thomas Blener Hasset, a soldier on service in Guernsey Castle, thought that the magisterial ladies had been neglected, and proceeded in 1578 to sing the fall of princesses.  It is needless to continue the roll of poets, but it is worth while to point out the remarkable fact that each new candidate held up the mirror to the magistrates so precisely in the manner of his predecessors, that it is difficult to distinguish Newton from Baldwin, or Churchyard from Niccols.

Richard Niccols, who is responsible for the collection in its final state, was a person of adventure, who had fought against Cadiz in the Ark, and understood the noble practice of the science of artillery.  By the time it came down to him, in 1610, the Mirror for Magistrates had attained such a size that he was obliged to omit what had formed a pleasing portion of it, the prose dialogues which knit the tales in verse together, such pleasant familiar chatter between the poets as “Ferrers, said Baldwin, take you the chronicles and mark them as they come,” and the like.  It was a pity to lose all this, but Niccols had additions of his own verse to make; ten new legends entitled “A Winter Night’s Vision,” and a long eulogy upon Queen Elizabeth, “England’s Eliza.”  He would have been more than human, if he had not considered all this far more valuable than the old prose babbling