ord Montagu
turned to the young man he had noticed as wearing the cognizance of
the First House in England. The bow was not the customary weapon of
the well-born; but still, in youth, its exercise formed one of the
accomplishments of the future knight; and even princes did not disdain,
on a popular holiday, to match a shaft against the yeoman's cloth-yard.
[At a later period, Henry VIII. was a match for the best bowman in his
kingdom. His accomplishment was hereditary, and distinguished alike his
wise father and his pious son.] The young man thus addressed, and whose
honest, open, handsome, hardy face augured a frank and fearless nature,
bowed his head in silence, and then slowly advancing to the umpires,
craved permission to essay his skill, and to borrow the loan of a shaft
and bow. Leave given and the weapons lent, as the young gentleman took
his stand, his comely person, his dress, of a better quality than that
of the competitors hitherto, and, above all, the Nevile badge worked in
silver on his hat, diverted the general attention from Nicholas Alwyn.
A mob is usually inclined to aristocratic predilections, and a murmur
of goodwill and expectation greeted him, when he put aside the gauntlet
offered to him, and said, "In my youth I was taught so to brace the bow
that the string should not touch the arm; and though eleven score yards
be but a boy's distance, a good archer will lay his body into his bow
['My father taught me to lay my body in my bow,' etc.," said Latimer, in
his well-known sermon before Edward VI.,--1549. The bishop also herein
observes that "it is best to give the bow so much bending that the
string need never touch the arm. This," he adds, "is practised by many
good archers with whom I am acquainted, as much as if he were to hit
the blanc four hundred yards away."

"A tall fellow this!" said Montagu; "and one I wot from the North," as
the young gallant fitted the shaft to the bow. And graceful and artistic
was the attitude he assumed,--the head slightly inclined, the feet
firmly planted, the left a little in advance, and the stretched sinews
of the bow-hand alone evincing that into that grasp was pressed the
whole strength of the easy and careless frame. The public expectation
was not disappointed,--the youth performed the feat considered of all
the most dexterous; his arrow, disdaining the white mark, struck the
small peg which fastened it to the butts, and which seemed literally
invisible to the by