66 OF A RECLUSE. -Not a Recluse by choice? then how? By doom Mid books, companions of his solitude, RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET, 1870. [All rights reserved.] 270. f. 202. RECREATIONS OF A RECLUSE. LITTLE TALBOT THE GREAT. THE very name of Talbot was a terror in France, and served to still fractious babes, as well as to rout his foes in a panic of dismay, when the Countess of Auvergne longed so to see this redoubtable Englishman, and plotted to take him with guile. In one of the scenes on the battlements before Orleans, in the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, where numbers of the French are gathered together, and the Dauphin and even La Pucelle are amongst them, we have an English soldier suddenly rushing in, with the cry of "A Talbot! A Talbot !" and incontinently there is an exeunt omnes, leaving their clothes behind them: a coup de théâtre eminently adapted to tickle the patriotism of British spectators when Elizabeth was queen. The one soldier who has thus put to flight almost an army of the aliens, is an old hand at the trick, which, by his own ac-. count, has answered more than once. He makes bold to take their leavings, and informs himself in VOL. II. 1 |