rather insignificant:  there are other pictures, however, in which we see a face more powerful, though less prepossessing.  In these the features are full and languid.  The eyes are large; but the expression, though remarkable, is not pleasing, and indicates cunning more than thought, passion more than feeling; while the heavy lips and massive chin wear a look of sensuality which is not to be mistaken.  Possibly all are like the original, but represented her under different circumstances, or at different periods of her life.  Previous to her engagement with the king, she was the object of fleeting attentions from the young noblemen about the court.  Lord Percy, eldest son of Lord Northumberland, as we all know, was said to have been engaged to her.  He was in the household of Cardinal Wolsey; and Cavendish, who was with him there, tells a long romantic story of the affair, which, if his account be true, was ultimately interrupted by Lord Northumberland himself.  The story is not without its difficulties, since Lord Percy had been contracted, several years previously, to a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury,[181] whom he afterwards married, and by the law he could not have formed a second engagement so long as the first was undissolved.  And again, he himself, when subsequently examined before the privy council, denied solemnly on his oath that any contract of the kind had existed.[182] At the same time, we cannot suppose Cavendish to have invented so circumstantial a narrative, and Percy would not have been examined if there had been no reason for suspicion.  Something, therefore, probably had passed between him and the young maid of honour, though we cannot now conjecture of what nature; and we can infer only that it was not openly to her discredit, or she would not have obtained the position which cost her so dear.  She herself confessed subsequently, before Archbishop Cranmer, to a connection of some kind into which she had entered before her acquaintance with Henry.  No evidence survives which will explain to what she referred, for the act of parliament which mentions the fact furnishes no details.[183] But it was of a kind which made her marriage with the king illegal, and illegitimatised the offspring of it; and it has been supposed, therefore, that, in spite of Lord Percy’s denial, he had really engaged himself to her, and was afraid to acknowledge it.[184] This supposition, however, is not easy to reconcile with the language of the act, which speaks of the circumstance, whatever it was, as only “recently known;” nor could a contract with Percy have invalidated her marriage with the king, when Percy having been pre-contracted to another person, it would have been itself invalid.  A light is thrown upon the subject by a letter found among Cromwell’s papers, addressed by some unknown person to a Mr. Melton, also unknown, but written obviously when “Mistress Anne” was a young lady about the court, and before she had been the object of any open attention from Henry.