le's Induction and Legend were inserted. The
success of this collection was prodigious; edition after edition was
given to the public under the inspection of different poetical revisers,
by each of whom copious additions were made to the original work. Its
favor and reputation continued during all the reign of Elizabeth, and
far into that of James; for Mr. Warton tells us that in Chapman's
"May-day," printed in 1611, "a gentleman of the most elegant taste for
reading and highly accomplished in the current books of the times, is
called 'one that has read Marcus Aurelius, Gesta Romanorum, and the
Mirror of Magistrates.'[28]"

[Note 28: History of English Poetry, vol. iii.]

The greater part of the contributors to this work were lawyers; an order
of men who, in most ages and nations, have accounted it a part of
professional duty to stand in opposition to popular seditions on one
hand, and to the violent and illegal exertion of arbitrary power on the
other. Accordingly, many of the legends are made to exemplify the evils
of both these excesses; and though, in more places than one, the
unlawfulness, on any provocation, of lifting a hand against "the Lord's
anointed" is in strong terms asserted, the deposition of tyrants is
often recorded with applause; and no mercy is shown to the corrupt judge
or minister who wrests law and justice in compliance with the wicked
will of his prince.

The newly published chronicles of the wars of York and Lancaster by
Hall, a writer who made some approach to the character of a genuine
historian, furnished facts to the first composers of the Mirror; the
later ones might draw also from Holinshed and Stow. There is some
probability that the idea of forming plays on English history was
suggested to Shakespeare by the earlier of these legends; and it is
certain that his plays, in their turn, furnished some of their brightest
ornaments of sentiment and diction to the legends added by later
editors.

To a modern reader, the greater part of these once admired pieces will
appear trite, prosaic, and tedious; but an uncultivated age--like the
children and the common people of all ages--is most attracted and
impressed by that mode of narration which leaves the least to be
supplied by the imagination of the hearer or reader; and when this
collection of history in verse is compared, not with the finished labors
of a Hume or a Robertson, but with the prolix and vulgar narratives of
the chroniclers, the