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It was the moment when the unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions of the lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and frivolous an affair as a tournament?

We have the lists, the knights, the prancing steeds, the trial of strength and skill. If our knights do not run the physical risks of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, they have all the mental stimulus. Wounded vanity will take the place of wounded limbs, and there will be broken hopes in lieu of broken heads. How many hearts in yonder group of gallant horsemen beat high with hope!

Who cannot recall the sweet illusions of those tripping youthful years, when, for the first time, Sir William Wallace strode so gallantly with waving plume and glittering falchion down the pages of Miss Porter, when sweet Helen Mar wasted herself in love for the hero, when the sun-browned Ivanhoe dashed so grandly into that famous tilting-ground near to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and brought the wicked Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert to a reckoning, when we wished the disinherited knight better things than the cold love of the passionless Rowena, and sighed over the fate of poor Fergus MacIvor?

The king had in Oxford 8000 men, and the towns of Banbury, Farringdon, Donnington Castle, and such places as might have been brought together in twenty-four hours, 15,000 or 20,000 men, with which, if he had then resolved to have quitted the place, and collected the forces in Worcester, Hereford, Lichfield, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and all the small castles and garrisons he had thereabouts, he might have had near 40,000 men, might have beaten the Scots from Newark, Colonel Jones from Chester, and all, before Fairfax, who was in the west, could be able to come to their relief.

'I had to rush round rather when I came to town, and it put the matter out of my head. You don't go in for motoring, I suppose, down in Essex? I said, no, I was working. He looked at his watch. 'I race to-day at three, he said. 'Where? I asked. 'I'd like to go to see it. 'Ashby-de-la-Zouch, he answered.

It happened that the estate of Snibston, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, was advertised for sale; and the young engineer’s experience as a coal-viewer and practical geologist suggested to his mind that coal was most probably to be found underneath. He communicated his views to his father on the subject.

God gives all in His good time. They astrologize too much. Joseph Hall was born at Bristow Park, by Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in the year 1574, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. These satires, with others published about the same time by Marlowe and Marston, were burnt by order of Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had no relish for that kind of writing.

Men and women as a rule very sensibly fall in love with one another in the particular places and the particular societies they happen to be cast among. A man at Ashby-de-la-Zouch does not hunt the world over to find his pre-established harmony at Paray-le-Monial or at Denver, Colorado.

His son Robert, who was surveying the Leicester and Swannington railway, observed on an estate called Snibston, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, what to his experienced geological eye looked like the probable indications of coal beneath the surface.

After this fatal blow, being retreated, as I have said, to Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, the king ordered us to divide; his Majesty, with a body of horse, about 3000, went to Lichfield, and through Cheshire into North Wales, and Sir Marmaduke Langdale, with about 2500, went to Newark.