prologued his piping after the following dismal fashion:--

"In dreary verse my rhymes I make,
Bewailing whilst such theme I take."

However, Baston was a monk of the Carmelite species, and I hope he bore
his agonies with religious bravery.

And now let us make a skip down to Charles Aleyn, _temp._ Charles I.
"of blessed memory." A Sidney collegian of Cambridge, he began life as
an usher in the celebrated school of Thomas Farnably,--another great
man of whom you never heard, O Don!--a famous school, in Goldsmith's
Rents, near Red-Cross Street, in the Parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate.
Those were stirring times; but Aleyn managed to write, before he died,
in 1640, a rousing great poem, intituled, "The Battailes of Crescey and
Poictiers, under the Fortunes and Valour of King Edward the Third of
that Name, and his Sonne, Edward, Prince of Wales, surnamed The Black."
8vo. 1633. Let me give you a taste of his quality, in the following
elaborate catalogue of the curiosities of a battle-field:--

"Here a hand severed, there an ear was cropped;
Here a chap fallen, and there an eye put out;
Here was an arm lopped off, there a nose dropped;
Here half a man, and there a less piece fought;
Like to dismembered statues they did stand,
Which had been mangled by Time's iron hand."

This is prosaic enough, and might have been written by a surgical
student; but this is better:--