lification of tradition, easily swelled to shocking deformity;
for falsehood itself generally pays so much respect to truth as to
make it the basis of its superstructures.

I have two reasons for believing Richard was not well made about the
shoulders. Among the drawings which I purchased at Vertue's sale was
one of Richard and his queen, of which nothing is expressed but the
out-lines. There is no intimation from whence the drawing was taken;
but by a collateral direction for the colour of the robe, if not
copied from a picture, it certainly was from some painted 'window;
where existing I do not pretend to say:--in this whole work I have
not gone beyond my vouchers. Richard's face is very comely, and
corresponds singularly with the portrait of him in the preface to
the Royal and Noble Authors. He has a sort of tippet of ermine
doubled about his neck, which seems calculated to disguise some
want of symmetry thereabouts. I have given two prints(51) of this
drawing, which is on large folio paper, that it may lead to a
discovery of the original, if not destroyed.

(51) In the prints, the single head is most exactly copied from the
drawing, which is unfinished. In the double plate, the reduced
likeness of the king could not be so perfectly preserved.

My other authority is John Rous, the antiquary of Warwickshire, who
saw Richard at Warwick in the interval of his two coronations, and
who describes him thus: "Parvae staturae erat, curtam habens faciem,
inaequales humeros, dexter superior, sinisterque inferior." What
feature in this portrait gives any idea of a monster? Or who can
believe that an eyewitness, and so minute a painter, would have
mentioned nothing but the inequality of shoulders, if Richard's form
had been a compound of ugliness? Could a Yorkist have drawn a less
disgusting representation? And yet Rous was a vehement Lancastrian;
and the moment he ceased to have truth before his eyes, gave in to
all the virulence and forgeries of his party, telling us in another
place, "that Richard remained two years in his mother's womb, and
came forth at last with teeth, and hair on his shoulders." I leave
it to the learned in the profession to decide whether women can go
two years with their burden, and produce a living infant; but that
this long pregnancy did not prevent the duchess, his mother, from
bearing afterwards, I can prove; and could we recover the register
of the births of her children, I should not be surprise