Upon the extreme right of James's army, a division of Highlanders, consisting of the clans of MacKenzie, Mac Lean, and others, commanded by the Earls of Lennox and Argyle, were so insufferably annoyed by the volleys of the English arrows, that they broke their ranks, and, in despite of the cries, entreaties, and signals of De la Motte, the French ambassador, who endeavoured to stop them, rushed tumultuously down-hill, and being attacked at once in flank and rear by Sir Edward Stanley, with the men of Cheshire and Lancashire, were routed with great slaughter.

The only Scottish division which remains to be mentioned, was commanded by James in person, and consisted of the choicest of his nobles and gentry, whose armour was so good, that the arrows made but slight impression upon them. They were all on foot-the king himself had parted with his horse. They engaged the Earl of Surrey, who opposed to them the division which he personally commanded. The Scots attacked with the greatest fury, and, for a time, had the better. Surrey's squadrons were disordered, his standard in great danger, Bothwel! and the Scottish reserve were advancing, and the English seemed in some risk of losing the battle. But Stanley, who had defeated the Highlanders, came up on one flank of the king's division; the admiral, who had conquered Crawford and Montrose, assailed them on the other. The Scots showed the most undaunted courage. Uniting themselves with the reserve under Bothwell, they formed themselves into a circle, with their spears extended on every side, and fought obstinately. Bows being now useless, the English advanced on all sides with their bills, a huge weapon which made ghastly wounds. But they could not force the Scots either to break or retire, although the carnage among them was dreadful. James himself died amid his warlike peers and

loyal gentry. He was twice wounded with arrows, and at length despatched with a bill. Night fell without the battle being absolutely decided, for the Scottish centre kept their ground, and Home and Dacre held each other at bay. But during the night, the remainder of the Scottish army drew off in silent despair from the bloody field, on which they left their king, and their choicest nobles and gentlemen.

This great and decisive victory was gained by the Earl of Surrey on the 9th September, 1513. The victors had about five thousand men slain, the Scots twice that number at least. But the loss lay not so much in the number of the slain, as in their rank and quality. The English lost very few men of distinction. The Scots left on the field the king, two bishops, two mitred abbots, twelve earls, thirteen lords, and five eldest sons of peers. The number of gentlemen slain was beyond calculation;-there is scarcely a family of name in Scottish history who did not lose a relative there.

The Scots were much disposed to dispute the fact that James IV. had fallen on Flodden Field. Some said he had retired from the kingdom, and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Others pretended, that in the twilight, when the fight was nigh ended, four tall horsemen came into the field, having each a bunch of straw on the point of their spears, as a token for them to know each other by. They said these men mounted the king on a dun hackney, and that he was seen to cross the Tweed with them at nightfall. Nobody pretended to say what they did with him, but it was believed he was murdered in Home Castle; and many many years afterwards it was currently reported, that in cleaning the draw-well of that ruinous fortress, the workmen found a skeleton wrapped in a bull's hide, and having a belt of iron round the waist. There was, however, no

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truth in this rumour. It was the absence of this belt of iron which the Scots founded upon to prove that the body of James could not have fallen into the

deprive their enemies of so signal a trophy of victory. The reports are contrary to common sense. Lord Home was the chamberlain of James IV., and high in his confidence. He had nothing whatever to gain by the king's death, and therefore we must acquit him of a great crime, for which there could be no adequate motive. The consequence of James's death proved, in fact, to be the earl's ruin, as we shall see presently.

It seems true, that the king usually wore the belt of iron in token of his repentence for his father's death, and the share he had in it. But it is not unlikely that he would lay aside such a cumbrous article of penance in a day of battle; or the English, when they despoiled his person, may have thrown it aside as of no value. The body which the English affirm to have been that of James, was found on the field by Lord Dacre, and carried by him to Berwick, and presented to Surrey. Both of these lords knew James's person too well to be mistaken. The body was also acknowledged by his two favourite attendants, Sir William Scott and Sir John Forman, who wept at beholding it. The fate of these relics was singular and degrading. They were not committed to the tomb, for the Pope, being

at that time in alliance with England against France, had laid James under a sentence of excommunication, so that no priest dared pronounce the funeral service over them. The royal corpse was therefore embalmed, and sent to the Monastery of Sheen, in Surrey. It lay there till the Reformation, when the monastery was given to the Duke of Suffolk; and after that period, the body, which was lapped up in a sheet of lead, was suffered to toss about the house like a piece of useless lumber. Stow, the historian, saw it flung into a waste room among old pieces of wood, lead, and other rubbish. Some idle workmen, "for their foolish pleasure," says the same writer, hewed off the head; and one Lancelot Young, master-glazier to Queen Elizabeth, finding a sweet smell come from thence, owing, doubtless, to the spices used for embalming the body, carried the head home, and kept it for some time; but in the end, caused the sexton of Saint Michael's, Wood Street, to bury it in the charnel house.

Such was the end of that king once so proud and powerful. The fatal battle of Flodden, in which he was slain, and his army destroyed, is justly considered as one of the most calamitous events in Scottish history.

instantly cast him into prison, and endeavoured, by tortures, to induce him to renounce the Christian faith. But no torments could shake his constancy of soul: he endured the rack, and every cruelty which the tyrant could devise, with undiminished fortitude; and was finally beheaded, by command of his relentless persecutor, in the year 290; or, as some authors record, in the year 287 of the Christian era.

Among other curious legends concerning St George, contained in the "Golden Legend" (an ancient collection of the lives and adventures of such martyrs and worthies as the Roman Catholic hierarchy denominate saints), it is related that, "On a time he came into the province of Libya, to a city which is called Silene, and by this city was a stayne or pond like a sea, wherein was a dragon which envenomed all the country, and the people of the city gave to him every day two sheep for to feed him, and when the sheep failed, there was taken a man and sheep. Then was an ordinance made in the town, that there should be taken the children and young people of the town by lot, and that it so happened the lot fell upon the king's daughter. Whereat the king wept, and demanded eight days' respite; and when the eight days were passed, then did the king array his daughter like as she should be wedded, and led her to the place where the dragon was. But St. George passed by at this time, and learning the cause of the lady's woe, he bore himself upon his horse against the dragon, smote him with his spear and threw him to the ground, and delivered the lady to her father, who was then baptised and all his people."

It was this story that was present to Spenser's mind when he wrote the account of the fight with the "dragon, horrible and stearne," in the eleventh canto of the first book of the "Faëry Queene" :

So downe he fell, and forth his life did breathe,
That vanisht into smoke and cloudes swift;
So downe he fell, that th' earth him underneath
Did grone as feeble, so great load to lift ;
So downe he fell, as an huge rocky clift,
Whose false foundation waves have washt away,
With dreadful poyse is from the mainland rift,
And rolling downe great Neptune doth dismay,
So downe he fell, and like an heaped mountaine
lay.

In relation to the above legend, St. George is always represented armed, on horseback, and tilting at a dragon under his feet; but as a Roman Catholic writer very sensibly remarks, this is no more than an emblematical figure, purporting that, by his faith and Christian fortitude, he conquered the devil (that is, the constant temptation to sin which all men naturally experience), called the dragon in the Apocalypse.

It has been, however, ingeniously supposed by a late writer, that the pictorial representations of St. George, and St. Michael the Archangel, on horseback, fighting with a dragon, have reference to the same event, and that the two personages are confounded, in representing the well-known legend of St. Michael combating with Satan. Yet this is but conjecture.

Notwithstanding the generally supposed holy life and character of St. George, of which the brief memoir which commences this article presents an abstract, some writers, conversant with ancient history, have portrayed him in a diametrically opposite manner. Gibbon, the learned author of the "Roman History," after informing us that George the Cappadocian was so surnamed from his parents, or education, and that he was born at Epiphania, in Cilicia, in a fuller's shop, thus continues his history:

"From this obscure and servile origin he raised himself by the talents of a parasite; and the patrons whom he assiduously flattered, procured for their worthless dependent a lucrative commission, or contract to supply the army with bacon. His employment was mean;