Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that G

Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be."

A sound of marching feet breaks on his ear, and, coming along the street, an officer and armed guard are seen escorting a prisoner. He is a man of gracious carriage and handsome face, evidently a noble of highest rank. Richard's words proclaim his name.

66

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence

It is the brother of King Edward, the Duke of Clarence, now on his way to imprisonment in the Tower. He is the first of Richard's victims. Hardly has he passed by and Gloucester entered another street when a funeral procession winds slowly along. It is that of the murdered King Henry VI., and the Earl of Warwick's youngest daughter, the Lady Anne, is chief among the mourners. She has good cause to hate the Duke of Gloucester, for she is the widow of that young Prince Edward who had been stabbed at Tewkesbury

by Richard and his brothers. Yet before the day was out the plausible tongue of Gloucester had won her consent to a second marriage with himself. No wonder that Richard laughed to himself when he recalled his own words that he was not fitted by nature to be a lover:

"I do mistake my person all this while :
Upon my life, she finds, although I cannot,
Myself to be a marvellous proper man.
I'll be at charges for a looking-glass
And entertain some score or two of tailors,
To study fashions to adorn my body :
Since I am crept in favour with myself,
I will maintain it with some little cost.
But first I'll turn yon fellow in his grave;
And then return lamenting to my love.
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass."

And so towards White-Friars the sombre procession made its way, with Gloucester chuckling under his breath, and grimacing at his shadow as it fell upon the rough cobble-stones of the narrow street.

In King Edward's palace, where Queen Elizabeth and her kinsmen, Lord Grey and Lord Rivers, were waiting upon the King, his presence brought confusion and strife. Cunningly Richard set one against the other and made it seem as though the imprisonment of Clarence had been brought about by the intrigues of the Woodville party.

That night two dark-browed murderous-looking villains had an interview with Richard, and when they left they carried with them a token which would admit them without question to the Tower of London, and a

commission which charged the Lieutenant of the prison to deliver the Duke of Clarence to their keeping.

The scene is now within a chamber in the Tower. It is early morning. The swiftly flowing Thames is washing past the stones of the old grey pile which Julius Cæsar founded. Traitor's Gate frowns upon the boatmen drifting by, and green moss clings to the steps which have been trodden by so many sad and hopeless men and women. The light of day struggles through a narrow, heavily-barred window into the room where a pale, heavy-eyed prisoner sits in painful and most sombre thought. He has been torn from his family, banished from his brother's presence, deprived of rank, dignities and freedom, and now sits under the oppression of a vivid dream which has terrified his soul. Passing the sentinels at the outer gate are two cloaked men, but Clarence knows nothing of their coming, as yet, and his dream is the weight which presses upon his mind. Brakenbury, the Lieutenant of the Tower, enters, and notes with sympathetic attention the sad looks of his noble charge. He, too, knows nothing of the darkbrowed men whose footsteps are now almost sounding on the stone steps of the prison.

"Why looks your grace so heavily to-day?" was his greeting.

Clarence started, and lifting up his eyes, said:

“O, I have pass'd a miserable night,

So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams,
That, as I am a Christian faithful man,
I would not spend another such a night,
Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days,
So full of dismal terror was the time!