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greatly to enhance our opinion of the value of these engravings.
As a matter of course, all these figures supply us with illustrations for a national history—illustrations of the people of England drawn in their own times, therefore of peculiar interest and value. No less admirably do they illustrate our great national writers in other departments of literature. How very valuable in this respect, for example, are the brasses of Alianore de Bohun, Duchess of Gloucester, of Lord Berkely, and Sir William Bagot, all characters in our great dramatist's "Richard II.;" also the brass of the standard-bearer to that unfortunate prince, Sir S. de Felbrigge, Knight of the Garter, who appears with the royal banner by his side, and who married a maid of honour to Anne of Bohemia, the queen. Then there is Lord Camoys, also a Knight of the Garter, who led the left wing at Agincourt; and Sir Anthony Grey (brother of Lord Grey of Groby, the first husband of Elizabeth Woodville afterwards Queen of Edward IV.) who, with his brother, fell at the battle of Bernard's Heath, near St. Alban's, February 17th, 1480; and, still later, at Hever is the brass to Sir T. Bullen, the father of the ill-fated mother of Queen Elizabeth; while at Blickling, another Anne Bullen, aunt to the queen, is represented in a brass. I might with ease extend very considerably this historic series, but I must be content to specify only one other example—a brass of poetic interest, the memorial of Thomas, son of Geoffrey Chaucer, at Ewelme.
Leaving for some future occasion a sketch of the general character of the inscriptions introduced into brasses, of their heraldry and symbolic devices, the attitudes of their effigies, and their accompanying accessories, including some observations upon the cross-