Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

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[128] matchlock musket, with an iron rest to support it, and a lance combined, to resist cavalry,--the whole being called “Swine (Swedish) feathers,” --a weapon so clumsy, that the Cavaliers say a Puritan needs two years practice to discharge one without winking. And over all these float flags of every hue and purport, from the blue and gold with its loyal “Ut rex, sit rex,” to the ominous crimson, flaming with a lurid furnace and the terriLle motto, “Quasi ignis conflatoris.”

And foremost rides Prince Rupert, darling of fortune and of war, with his beautiful and thoughtful face of twenty-three, stern and bronzed already, yet beardless and dimpled, his dark and passionate eyes, his long love-locks drooping over costly embroidery, his graceful scarlet cloak, his white-plumed hat, and his tall and stately form, which, almost alone in the army, has not yet known a wound. His high-born beauty is preserved to us forever on the canvas of Vandyck, and as the Italians have named the artist “Il Pittore Cavalieresco,” so will this subject of his skill remain forever the ideal of Il Cavaliere Pittoresco. And as he now rides at the head of this brilliant array, his beautiful white dog bounds onward joyously beside him, that quadruped renowned in the pamphlets of the time, whose snowy skin has been stained by many a blood-drop in the desperate forays of his master, but who has thus far escaped so safely that the Puritans believe him a familiar spirit, and try to destroy him “by poyson and extempore prayer, which yet hurt him no more than the plague plaster did Mr. Pym.” Failing in this, they pronounce the pretty creature to be “a divell, not a very downright divell, but some Lapland ladye, once by nature a handsome white ladye, now by art a handsome white dogge.”