At the birth of the child that, when a man, is to bring so much misery upon thousands af families and persons, and that is to make the lovely country of England the scene of his horrid deeds, whole nature is said to have been in an uproar to remonstrate, as it were, against that fatal event, or to wail, and lament it at least. It is Henry VI. that remembers Richard of it. He says to Richard:

The owl shriekd at thy birth, an evil sign;

The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time,

Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempests shook down trees;

The raven rook'’d her on the chimney'’s top,

And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.(Henry VI. 3 V. V. 6.) And the birth itself, according to Shakespeare, was an extraordinary and uncommon one, by which anomaly nature wanted to indicate that the child, born in such an abnormous way, was to de a wicked man. Henry VI. continues in the above place to remind Richard of this. Thou wast, he says,

. an indigested and deformed lump.

recth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,

To signify thou com'st to bite the world. And Richard says of himself:

She(love) did corrupt frail nature with some bribe

To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub;

To make an envious mountain on my back,

Where sits deformity to mock my body;

To shape my legs of an unequal size;

To disproportion me in every part.

Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp,

That carries no impression like the dam.(Henry VI. 33 P. III. 2.) What concerns the omina accompanying the birth, we may be sure that they are an invention either of tradition, or of the poet to make the picture the more awful. Contemporary writers, at least, know nothing of such extraordinary circumstances, they only report that the birth took place on the 2 of October 1452. As to the deformity, several contemporaneous writers are silent of it altogether, there is but the Lancastrian writer Rous who mentions his right shoulder being higher than his left, which however is far from being crook-backed. None speak of lameness or disagree- able features. Even Rous calls him of insinuating and bland expression. Thomas More merely says that he was deformed“"as the fame ranne of those that hated him,“ and this account, therefore, was not based upon facts, but upon tradition. And that person from whom he may have had those news, and who hated Richard was most likely the bishop Morton in whose house he had been residing for some time in his youth. This indication of More, however, seems to have been taken up by other writers, and to have been more and more exaggerated till it became in Shakespeare that deformed body, the abode of a depraved mind. There seems only to remain as the truth, that Richard had indeed the right shoulder higher than the left, which may account for his enemies' giving him the nickname of crook-backed. But that he was not really crook-backed is sufficiently proved by his being so strong, which could not have been, had his spine been distorded. His stature was small, and his features were like his fathers, short and compact, and handsome, but.

1*