And this is the translation which the doggerel knave Wamba made of the Latin lines: 

“Requiescat.

“Under the stone you behold,
Buried, and coffined, and cold,
Lieth Sir Wilfrid the Bold.

“Always he marched in advance,
Warring in Flanders and France,
Doughty with sword and with lance.

“Famous in Saracen fight,
Rode in his youth the good knight,
Scattering Paynims in flight.

     “Brian the Templar untrue,
     Fairly in tourney he slew,
     Saw Hierusalem too.

     “Now he is buried and gone,
     Lying beneath the gray stone: 
     Where shall you find such a one?

     “Long time his widow deplored,
     Weeping the fate of her lord,
     Sadly cut off by the sword.

     “When she was eased of her pain,
     Came the good Lord Athelstane,
     When her ladyship married again.”

Athelstane burst into a loud laugh, when he heard it, at the last line, but Rowena would have had the fool whipped, had not the Thane interceded; and to him, she said, she could refuse nothing.

CHAPTER IV.

Ivanhoe redivivus.

I trust nobody will suppose, from the events described in the last chapter, that our friend Ivanhoe is really dead.  Because we have given him an epitaph or two and a monument, are these any reasons that he should be really gone out of the world?  No:  as in the pantomime, when we see Clown and Pantaloon lay out Harlequin and cry over him, we are always sure that Master Harlequin will be up at the next minute alert and shining in his glistening coat; and, after giving a box on the ears to the pair of them, will be taking a dance with Columbine, or leaping gayly through the clock-face, or into the three-pair-of-stairs’ window:—­so Sir Wilfrid, the Harlequin of our Christmas piece, may be run through a little, or may make believe to be dead, but will assuredly rise up again when he is wanted, and show himself at the right moment.

The suspicious-looking characters from whom Wamba ran away were no cut-throats and plunderers, as the poor knave imagined, but no other than Ivanhoe’s friend, the hermit, and a reverend brother of his, who visited the scene of the late battle in order to see if any Christians still survived there, whom they might shrive and get ready for heaven, or to whom they might possibly offer the benefit of their skill as leeches.  Both were prodigiously learned in the healing art; and had about them those precious elixirs which so often occur in romances, and with which patients are so miraculously restored.  Abruptly dropping his master’s head from his lap as he fled, poor Wamba caused the knight’s pate to fall with rather a heavy thump to the ground, and if the knave had but stayed a minute longer, he would have heard Sir Wilfrid utter a deep groan.  But though the fool heard him not, the holy hermits did;