LEICESTER ABBEY.

NEAR the town of Leicester a monastery of Black Canons was founded in 1143, in honour of the Virgin Mary, by Robert le Bossin, earl of Leicester, and called, from its situation in the fields or meadows, Sancta Maria de Pratis, or St. Mary de Prez: it was richly endowed, the revenues at the dissolution amounting to £1062 per annum. Of this great and wealthy establishment, to which, from its being the scene of Cardinal Wolsey's death, considerable interest attaches, a mass of shapeless ruin alone remains. Here the fallen minister of the tyrant Henry VIII. died, on the 29th of November, 1530, having been compelled by illness to seek an asylum in the Abbey while travelling as a prisoner to London.

KING HENRY VIII.

ACT IV. SCENE II.

LEICESTER ABBEY.

QUEEN KATHERINE and GRIFFITH.

Kath. Didst thou not tell me, Griffith, as thou led'st me, That the great child of honour, Cardinal Wolsey,

Was dead?

Grif.

Well, the voice goes, madam :

For after the stout earl Northumberland

Arrested him at York, and brought him forward

(As a man sorely tainted) to his answer,

He fell sick suddenly, and grew so ill,

He could not sit his mule.

Grif. At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester,
Lodged in the abbey; where the reverend abbot,
With all his convent, honourably received him ;
To whom he gave these words,-' O father abbot,
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
Give him a little earth for charity !'

So went to bed: where eagerly his sickness
Pursued him still; and, three nights after this,
About the hour of eight, (which he himself
Foretold should be his last,) full of repentance,
Continual meditations, tears, and sorrows,