Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/403

Rh the kingdom decorates and diadems this like a crown-jewel of the first water of romantic interest. Lady Godiva is the patron saint of the city-a Saxon saint, draped in pendent tresses of golden hair. And the people of Coventry believe in her, and have believed in her, with a beautiful, unreasoning, natural, romantic faith that has come down, like the substance of a happy vision, through half a dozen centuries. And if you take the census of her believers and admirers in both hemispheres, you will find that nine-tenths of the English-speaking race cherish and enjoy the sentiment of her actual existence. Poets have sung of her—bards before Shakespeare was born—and the Poet Laureate of the present day, and, of the two heroines of his verse. Lady Godiva is a more tangible being than Guinevere, and will always have ten times the popular homage bestowed upon that splendid fiction in the "Mort d'Arthur." Through these many centuries gone her memory has lived, moved, and had a being more distinctive than all the English queens who have died from this to the Conquest. She has had her triumphal processions in queenly state through Coventry on the anniversary of that celebrated ride, when she "unclasped the wedded eagles of her belt," and paced her palfrey from wall to wall, "and built herself an everlasting name." Few living queens, on either side of Elizabeth's time, have been