rity for his
having been

'Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half-made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable,
The dogs bark at me, as I halt by them.'

A Scotch commission addressed him with praise of the 'princely majesty
and royal authority sparkling in his face.' Rev. Dr. Shaw's discourse to
the Londoners, dwells upon the Protector's likeness to the noble Duke,
his father: his mother was a beauty, his brothers were handsome: a
monstrous contrast on Richard's part would have been alluded to by the
accurate Philip de Comines: the only remaining print of his person is at
least fair: the immensely heavy armor of the times may have bowed his
form a little, and no doubt he was pale, and a little higher shouldered
on the right than the left side: but, if Anne always loved him, as is
now proved, and the princess Elizabeth sought his affection after the
Queen's decease, he could not have been the hideous dwarf at which dogs
howl. Nay, so far from there being an atom of truth in that famous
wooing scene which provokes from Richard the sarcasm:

'Was ever woman in this humor wooed?
Was ever woman in this humor won?'

Richard actually detected her in the disguise of a kitchen-girl, at
London, and renewed his early attachment in the court of the Archbishop
of York. And while Anne was never in her lifetime charged with
insensibility to the death of her relatives, or lack of feeling, she
died not from any cruelty of his, but from weakness, and especially from
grief over her boy's sudden decease. Richard indeed 'loved her early,
loved her late,' and could neither have desired nor designed a calamity
which lost him many English hearts. The burial of Henry VI. Richard
himself solemnized with great state; a favor that no one of Henry's
party was brave and generous enough to return to the last crowned head
of the rival house.

Gloucester did not need to urge on the well-deserved doom of Clarence:
both Houses of Parliament voted it; King Edward plead for it; the
omnipotent relatives of the Queen hastened it with characteristic
malice; they may have honestly believed that the peaceful succession of
the crown was in peril so long as this plotting traitor lived. No doubt
it was.

It is next to certain that Richard did not stab Henry VI., nor the
murdered son of Margaret, though he had every provocation in the insults
showered upon