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Thus Edward first appears in history as the cruel, ruthless murderer of scores of the most truly noble of the nobility of his own England, and of thousands of humbler Englishmen, and his later life is sadly in harmony with this beginning. It is true, as Sir Matthew Hale declares, that more was done in the first thirteen years of his reign than in the succeeding four centuries "to settle and establish the distributive justice of the kingdom," and that he actually upheld and obeyed the "Magna Charta," whose defenders and champions he had shamelessly slaughtered-but his respect for that immortal charter was dictated simply and solely by policy; he was too shrewd to fail to read the lessons of his father's disasters, which he knew were the natural fruit of misrule; he was no more honest, no more just, no more magnanimous, than his father, but he was far more sagacious and crafty. That he was not actuated by worthy motives is unequivocally betrayed by his unjustifiable conduct towards Wales-that he was not only a false-hearted and wickedly selfish monarch, but at heart a cruel, inhuman monster, is incontestibly shown by his treatment of Llewellyn and of the heroic David. But his later course in and towards Scotland exceeds in shameless wickedness

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even that in and towards Wales. History cannot produce a blacker, more perfidious, or more bloodthirsty record. Let me quote a single item from this record: "In the siege of the town of Berwick, he himself, mounted on his horse Bayard, was the first who leaped over the dike. The carnage that followed is one among the many inef faceable blots on the memory of this great (?) but unrelenting man; infancy, womanhood, old age, all were butchered that came within reach of the victors' swords." Then, still later, his positively disgusting treatment of the great Wallace-I cannot dwell on this story; it is sickening; suffice it to say, the world has never produced a more infamous murderer than him who murdered Wallace. It was in one of his incursions into Scotland that Edward stole "the Stone of Destiny," and had it removed from Scone to Westminster."

But all Edward's infamy was secured at small profit; scarcely had he gotten rid of Wallace, when Bruce arose and completely recovered his realm from the English power. Edward never wavered in his injustice and wickedness-on his death-bed, he directed what he could no longer lead; but his army, under Pembroke, was signally routed; the dying king remounted his horse to

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lead his army in person, but in vain ; an enemy even his indomitable will and great military genius could not check, laid him low; at Burgh on the Sands, he was compelled to tarry for a night, and the next morning his soul went, unrelenting, unrepentant, the final journey, leaving his corpse to be borne with great pomp to Westminster; on the way, it was temporarily placed in Waltham Abbey, as Dr. Lossing says: here it rested for fifteen weeks, during which it was attended night and day by religious men from the neighboring monasteries. That Edward was innately cruel and bloodthirsty, I think is very clearly shown by the single statement of Froissart that in his very last moments he required his son to swear that he would boil his body in a cauldron, bury the flesh, and keep the bones to be carried at the head of an army against the Scots every time they should rebel."

But at Waltham there is a noble monument, the Waltham Cross, which tells us of a phase of Edward's character which we may contemplate with pleasure and with wonder too, that so cruel, so wicked a king could have been so loving a husband.

Eleanor, Edward's wife, was a daughter of Ferdinand III., of Castile, and was unquestionably a noble wife. She accompanied her husband to the Holy Land in the crusade of 1271, and when he was wounded at Acre by Azazim, a Saracen, she, with lips "anointed with the virthe of lovely affection," drew the poison from the wound. Royal marriages are usually simply state affairs, without even a pretence of love, but we cannot doubt that Edward and Eleanor truly loved. "She was married to him," says an English writer, "at Bures in

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Spain, crowned with him the day of his coronation, lived his wife, in lovely participation of all his troubles and long voyages, thirty-six years, and died either at Grantham, or at Hardeby, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, as Edward was on his way to Scotland, when he first began to insinuate himself into the affairs of that kingdom. But Edward's passion for ruling and oppressing the Scots succumbed now to a holier feeling. His journey was stopped, he gave all his thoughts to his faithful and devoted partner's remains, which were embalmed, and the internal parts laid in Lincoln Cathedral, the body itself being conveyed to Westminster. A long and melancholy journey the mourning king made with it to the Chapel of King Edward the Confessor; and the nation, to whom Eleanor, had been a loving mother,' sincerely sympathized in his grief." At Lincoln, Stamford, Dunstable, St. Albans, Geddington, Northampton, Waltham, and eight other

places, the sad procession paused, and at each Edward erected a beautiful Gothic monument, designated a Cross, to commemorate the virtues of the beloved deceased; of the entire fifteen but three now stand, those of Geddington, Northampton and Waltham.

We are told that his affection for his father was likewise deep and fervent; when he received intelligence of his father's death, soon after the death of an infant son, his grief was so evident that some surprise was expressed in his hearing that he should be so much more moved at the death of his aged father than at that of his own son; his reply was: "The loss of my son is a loss which I may hope to repair; but the death of a father is a loss irreparable.”

Strange, indeed, does it seem that one susceptible to the sentiments of love, could have been so unscrupulously ambitious and so heartlessly inhuman in his efforts to satisfy that ambition!

THE SANCHI TOPE AT BHOPAUL IN CENTRAL INDIA. IN the March MONTHLY, page 217, there are an engraving and a six-line mention of this Tope. No doubt Mr. Morden is right in regarding the structure as a mound-tomb, but it is more than a mere barrow as defined by him (“simply a large mound raised over the corpse of a deceased chieftain, hero, saint, or other man of special eminence"), it is a sacred edifice. General Cunningham, the great English scholar, in "The Bilsah Topes," tells us: "A Tope is properly a religious edifice dedicated emphatically to Buddha; that is, either to the Celestial Adi Buddha, the great First Cause of all things, or to one of his emanations, the Mánúshi, or 'Mortal' Buddhas, of whom the most celebrated and the only historical one is Sákya Muni, who died B.C. 543." He further says that the topes are of three classes: "First, the Dedicatory, which was consecrated to the supreme Buddha; secondly the strictly Funereal, which contained the ashes of the dead; and third, the Memorial, which was built in celebrated spots." The topes of all these classes were sacred edifices, but in different degrees. The distinguishing mark of the first class was a representation of the two eyes symbolizing the omniscience of the supreme Buddha.

eastern front, with one of the elaborately carved gateways; there are four gateways, similar though not equal to the northeastern; these are placed near the four corners, facing two to the east and two to the west; the engraving shows the northwestern in the background. We offer herewith an admirable illustration of the handsomest of these gateways, the northeastern, with portions of the same enlarged to afford a better idea of the superbly sculptured figures which literally cover the entire surfaces.

The main structure is a solid dome of brick and stucco, one hundred and twenty-one feet in diameter and sixty-two in height; it is surrounded by a stone railing eight feet eight inches in height, placed at a distance of nine feet and a half from the base of the mound; the four gateways are each thirty-three feet in height and eleven feet nine inches in width, to the outer edge of the side pillars.

The date of the original construction of this tope is variously given by critics of equal credit, and we do not pretend to any certainty in preferring the estimate of General Cunningham, who places the origin of the tope proper at about 500 B.C.; The smail engraving on page 217 shows the indeed, it may be that the apparently conflicting

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GATEWAY OF THE SANCHI TOPE, BHOPAUL, CENTRAL INDIA. dates can be discovered to be not actually antagonistic. Mr. Fergusson shows that no stone structure is to be found in India of an earlier time than the reign of Asoka, about 280 B.C., when Buddhism became the State religion. Buddhism had, however, as is well known, existed for three centuries; the prophet Sákya Muni, afterwards styled Buddha, died in 543 B.C., at which time he had brought within the influence of his system

the aboriginal races of all Northern India. Now, accepting Mr. Fergusson's strong proofs that no stone structure is to be found in India of a date earlier than 280 B.C., and even the conjectures of those who place the construction of the stone railing at 250 B.C., admitting too Mr. Fergusson's statements that bricks and stucco were not used in mound or barrow building earlier than 250 B.C., all this does not disprove General Cunningham's

era-the dates assigned by various scholars to the present stone gateways. Indeed, the very form of the railing and of the gateways suggests the thought that they were a reproduction in stone of wooden originals. But, there is another reason why we are disposed to believe that the stone gateways are fac-similes of earlier wooden ones, and that lies in the fact that the serpent does not appear among the sculptured objects of worship; but one serpent is seen on the eastern or main gateway, and that is the Naga or five-headed serpent, portrayed not as an object of worship, but as worshipping the Sacred Tree. The only objects of worship apparent on these gateways are the Tree and the Dagoba-the Sacred Tree and the Sacred Dagoba being the earliest represented objects of worA PORTION OF THE LOWER LINTEL-FRONT. ship in the Buddhist system, while estimate that the original mound was raised as it is well-known that at a later period the serpent early as 500 B.C., or within fifty years after Sákya became a most important object of such devotion; Muni had so widely diffused the Buddhist tenets in the tope of Amravati, the serpent appears to and ideas. The tradition of the country is clear command more attention than the Tree or Dagoba. that the tope of Sanchi is viewed with special Mr. Fergusson remarks on the absence of the reverence on account of its great antiquity. Asoka serpent as an object of worship and its appearance having made Buddhism the state religion, might as worshipping the Tree, among the sculptures very well proceed to

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tumulus into a more substantial brick and stucco tope. And as to the railing, doubtless, the old wooden enclosure was in process of decay, and was replaced as late as 250 B. C., while the gateways, possibly originally of harder and more durable wood, may have been made to answer, because of the labor and cost of reproducing

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