bullet-proof also. Scantily furnished with basinet or breastplate,
pot, haqueton, cuirass, pouldron, taslets, vambraces, or cuisses,--each
with the best piece of iron he could secure when the ancestral armory
was ransacked,--they yet care little for the deficit, remembering, that,
when they first rode down the enemy at Worcester, there was not a piece
of armor on their side, while the Puritans were armed to a man. There
are a thousand horsemen under Percy and O'Neal, armed with swords,
pole-axes, and petronels; this includes Rupert's own lifeguard of chosen
men. Lord Wentworth, with Innis and Washington, leads three hundred and
fifty dragoons,--dragoons of the old model, intended to fight either
on foot or on horseback, whence the name they bear, and the emblematic
dragon which adorns their carbines. The advanced guard, or "forlorn
hope," of a hundred horse and fifty dragoons, is commanded by Will
Legge, Rupert's life-long friend and correspondent; and Herbert Lunsford
leads the infantry, "the inhuman cannibal foot," as the Puritan journals
call them. There are five hundred of these, in lightest marching order,
and carrying either pike or arquebuse,--this last being a matchlock
musket with an iron rest to support it, and a lance combined, to resist
cavalry,--the whole being called "Swine (Swedish) feathers,"--a weapon
so clumsy, that the Cavaliers say a Puritan needs two years' practice to
discharge one without winking. And over all these float flags of every
hue and purport, from the blue and gold with its loyal "_Ut rex, sit
rex_" to the ominous crimson, flaming with a lurid furnace and the
terrible motto, "_Quasi ignis conflatoris_."

And foremost rides Prince Rupert, darling of fortune and of war, with
his beautiful and thoughtful face of twenty-three, stern and bronzed
already, yet beardless and dimpled, his dark and passionate eyes, his
long love-locks drooping over costly embroidery, his graceful scarlet
cloak, his white-plumed hat, and his tall and stately form, which,
almost alone in the army, has not yet known a wound. His high-born
beauty is preserved to us forever on the canvas of Vandyck, and as the
Italians have named the artist "Il Pittore Cavalieresco," so will
this subject of his skill remain forever the ideal of Il Cavaliere
Pittoresco. And as he now rides at the head of this brilliant array, his
beautiful white dog bounds onward joyously beside him, that quadruped
renowned in the pamphlets of the time,