s story: but the
picture of the excitable Celts mobbing their heroes is vivid enough to
make a good stopping-place. If things really went as described, one must
suppose that a sudden panic came on the Goths, and that they took
Ecdicius and his handful of troopers as merely _eclaireurs_ of a sally
in force, and drew back to the higher ground to resist it.

[74] His own experience of marriage cannot have made the subject wholly
agreeable to him: for he was, it may not be quite impertinent to remind
the reader, the first husband of Eleanor of Guienne.

ENGLISH LETTERS

THE PASTONS. FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Few families in England have achieved a permanent "place i'
the story" after such a curious fashion as the Pastons of
Paston (Pastons "of that ilk") in Norfolk. They were not
exactly "great people" and no member of the family was of
very eminent distinction in any walk of life, though they
had judges, soldiers, and sailors etc. among them, and
though, some time before the house became extinct, its
representative attained the peerage with the title of Earl
of Yarmouth. But they were busy people in the troublesome
times of the Roses, and they obtained a good deal of
property, partly by the death of Sir John Fastolf, noted in
the French wars and muddled by posterity (there seems to
have been no real resemblance between them except an
accusation of cowardice, probably false in both cases, and
an imperfectly anagrammatised relation of names) with
Shakespeare's "Falstaff." But they produced, received, and
kept a great mass of letters which, despite the extinction
of the family in 1732 survived, were partially printed later
in the century by Fenn, and more fully a hundred years after
by the late Mr. Gairdner. Although (see Introduction) of no
particular literary merit they are singularly varied in
subject and authorship, and they give us perhaps a more
complete view of the domestic experiences of a single family
(not dissociated from public affairs) than we have from any
period of English history till quite modern times. Indeed,
it would not be easy to put the finger on an exact parallel
to them at _any_ time. I have selected from a great mass of
documents two--one of love and one of war according to the
good old division. John Jernyngan's letter to Margaret
Mauteby