by the gift of William the Conqueror, thus became first Norman Earl of Warwick. After the De Newburghs came the Beauchamps (who have so largely left the impress of their proud and generous character upon the venerable ecclesiastic edifice known as Warwick High Church, at the top of Church Street, where the splendours of their Beauchamp Chapel rival those of Henry the Seventh's Chapel in Westminster Abbey); then the Nevilles, and the Plantagenets; and at this point history and romance come into the life of Warwick Castle with undeniable glamour. History and romance, indeed, eternally live here, and are as deathless as the fame of Shakespeare, who trod the very scene I am about to describe in 1575, when he passed through Warwick with his father on his way to 'the Princely Pleasures of Kenilworth'; trod, as a little boy of eleven, in the very footsteps of the two great characters which he has so graphically delineated in his historical plays.

Standing beneath the shadows of the two fine Towers of the Castle, and looking down the crooked street, the imagination of the beholder, be it ever so little coloured

with the tincture of history, can see before him a picture more romantic and historic than the pen of fiction could ever draw. He is, in fact, a lay figure in a series of gorgeous pictures of the past. One by one they rise up before him, as a moving panorama brings scene after scene upon the eye. To go back to pre-Shakespearean and pre-Elizabethan days, as he stands under the magnificent towers the dull and dumb twentieth-century spectator of the days of Chivalry-he is once more back in the stirring and warlike days of York and Lancaster.

Who are these that are coming up the kidney-stones of the crooked street to the great Postern Door of the Castleone a fine and stern warrior of graceful and sinuous build, the other an exquisite, a fop, in scarlet doublet and hose, and yellow shoes, and with an overpowering smell of rare perfume? Who are these? They are great figures in history. The greater of the two is Richard Neville, 'the King-Maker,' the great and valorous Earl of Warwick. The younger man is his friend and guest, Richard, Duke of Gloster, who is staying at the Castle with his