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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

Yuan Yao
Xing Su
Hanghang Tong

Mobile Data
Mining

123
SpringerBriefs in Computer Science

Series editors
Stan Zdonik, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Shashi Shekhar, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Xindong Wu, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
Lakhmi C. Jain, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
David Padua, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA
Xuemin Sherman Shen, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Borko Furht, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA
V. S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Martial Hebert, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Katsushi Ikeuchi, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Bruno Siciliano, Università di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy
Sushil Jajodia, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA
Newton Lee, Institute for Education, Research, and Scholarships in Los Angeles,
California, USA
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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10028


Yuan Yao • Xing Su • Hanghang Tong

Mobile Data Mining

123
Yuan Yao Xing Su
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Graduate Center
Nanjing University City University of New York
Nanjing, China New York, NY, USA

Hanghang Tong
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ, USA

ISSN 2191-5768 ISSN 2191-5776 (electronic)


SpringerBriefs in Computer Science
ISBN 978-3-030-02100-9 ISBN 978-3-030-02101-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02101-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958912

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018


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Preface

We have witnessed a fast-moving technological revolution due to the emergence


of powerful smartphones. Smartphones are no longer limited to a texting-calling
device, but a personal intelligent assistant with increasing abilities in sensing,
computing, and networking. To make full use of this intelligent assistant, various
data are collected and analyzed to provide better services for the end users.
In this book, we introduce the essential steps for mobile data mining tasks,
including data collection (Chap. 2), feature engineering (Chap. 3), and learning
models (Chaps. 4–6). We also discuss some key challenges and possible solutions
during the introduction of each step. Overall, this book can serve as a primer for
beginners to gain a big picture of mobile data mining. It also covers some useful
information for further in-depth research on the topic.

Nanjing, China Yuan Yao


New York, NY, USA Xing Su
Tempe, AZ, USA Hanghang Tong
Aug 28, 2018

v
Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Background. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Typical Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Steps, Characteristics, and Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Roadmap. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2 Data Capturing and Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.1 Smartphone Sensors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2 Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3 Data Denoising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3 Feature Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.1 Data Segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.2 Feature Extraction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.3 Feature Analysis and Sensor Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4 Hierarchical Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.1 Problem Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.2 A Hierarchical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.3 Experimental Evaluations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5 Personalized Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5.1 Problem Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5.2 The Personalized Approach: Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
5.3 The Personalized Approach: Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5.3.1 Similarity Computation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5.3.2 Distribution Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.3.3 Sample Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5.3.4 Sample Reweighting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5.3.5 Algorithm Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

vii
viii Contents

5.4 Experimental Evaluations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38


5.4.1 Experiment Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5.4.2 Experiment Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
6 Online Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
6.1 Problem Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
6.2 Online Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
6.3 Experimental Evaluations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
6.3.1 Online Learning vs. Offline Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
6.3.2 How Much Data Are Enough to Train an Initial Model? . . . . . . 49
6.3.3 Combining with the Hierarchical Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
6.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
7 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
7.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
7.2 Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
7.2.1 More Combinations of Sensors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
7.2.2 More Usages of Smartphone Sensors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Acronyms

ARA Average Resultant Acceleration


DFT Discrete Fourier Transform
ETL Extraction, Transformation, and Loading
FFT Fast Fourier Transform
GMS Global System for Mobile Communications
GPS Global Positioning System
KMM Kernel Mean Matching
Pegasos Primal Estimated sub-GrAdient SOlver
SGD Stochastic Gradient Descent
SMA Signal-Magnitude Area
SVM Support Vector Machine

ix
Chapter 1
Introduction

Abstract Smartphones are usually equipped with various sensors by which the
personal data of the users can be collected. To make full use of the smartphone
data, mobile data mining aims to discover useful knowledge from the collected
data in order to provide better services for the users. In this chapter, we introduce
some background information about mobile data mining, including what data can
be collected by smartphones, what applications can be built upon the collected data,
what are the key steps for a typical mobile data mining task, and what are the key
characteristics and challenges of mobile data mining.

1.1 Background

Nowadays, mobile devices especially smartphones are acting as intelligent assistants


of their users by collecting various personal data and providing further services
based on these data. The key advantage of this assistant lies in the fact that
smartphone is an integral, unobtrusive part of our wearable devices, while it is
usually equipped with multiple powerful sensors including GPS, accelerometer,
gravity sensor, barometer, light sensor, gyroscope, and compass. Various types
of data can be collected from these sensors (see Sect. 2.1 for more details). For
example, GPS identifies the position of your smartphone, accelerometer records the
accelerations along axes, and gyroscope measures the speed and angle of rotations.
In a general sense, mobile data include not only sensor data but any data generated
from mobile phones such as call log, message log, application usage data, etc. In
this book, we mainly focus on the sensor data.
The mobile data generated by the sensors have already enabled some interest-
ing and well-known applications. For example, based on the accelerations from
accelerometer, we can compute the speed and direction that your phone is moving,
and this is the reason why your smartphone can track your steps; likewise, the
gyroscope functions when you are tilting the screen to steer in a racing game.
In fact, the massive volume and convenient access of various mobile senor data
have greatly facilitated a variety of more advanced mobile data mining applications,
ranging from health and fitness monitoring, assistive technology and elderly care,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 1


Y. Yao et al., Mobile Data Mining, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02101-6_1
2 1 Introduction

indoor localization and navigation, to urban computing and smart transportation,


etc. The key idea behind these applications is to learn the facts of activities, events,
and situations where the users are involved together with smartphones.
Existing literature has also extensively studied the mobile data mining topic,
which can be divided into the following categories [43]: location-aware mining,
context-aware mining, and social mining. Location-awareness is achieved by the
connectivity or interaction with the ambient environment, and this category includes
outdoor localization and indoor localization. The location information for outdoor
localization is obtained through GPS, cellular tower connection, etc; in contrast,
due to the constraint of no GPS and weak cellular reception, indoor localization is a
much more active research area. In this area, various sources of data are utilized such
as the wifi connections (along with the signal strength) [13, 23, 28, 34, 39, 61], the
bluetooth connectivities [65], the acoustic sensor [22, 38, 51], the barometer [66],
the magnetic sensor or compass [62], etc. Context-awareness means to infer the
users’ activities from smartphone data. Typical activities include walking on stairs,
sitting, sleeping, driving, and jogging. Usually, detected activities are further used
for other tasks in both individual level and aggregation level. In the individual
level, the detected walking speed may reveal the mood of a person [37], the
accelerations in driving may reveal the person’s driving style [16], the distribution
of activities may indicate the user’s living style [31]; in the aggregation level, the
detected activities of a set of persons can be used in traffic characterization and
control [12, 20], carbon emission estimation [40], etc. The third social mining
research involves the social media (e.g., the location based twitter data [3]) and
focuses on the aggregation of users’ mobilities and activities. Examples in this
category includes the modeling of the interplay between human’s mobility and
social ties [25, 54, 59].

1.2 Typical Applications

In this section, we discuss some typical mobile data mining applications. As


mentioned above, a smartphone can provide sensor data which can be easily
processed to further obtain knowledge concerning the motion of the device and the
ambient environment. Based on these data, mobile data mining solutions can be
applied either as the core method or an assistive technology in many applications.
For example, learning the pattern of daily smartphone locations via cellular tower
connection records in a city could help estimate the transportation volume and
predict the traffic of the city. Smartphone based activity recognition could help the
public health agency on outdoor activity survey. Based on the fields towards which
mobile data mining is applied, the main applications fall into the following four
categories.
• Urban computing. Urban computing is an emerging field, which uses the data
that are generated in cities from different sources such as traffic flow, human
mobility, and geographical data to help the modernization of people’s lives
1.3 Steps, Characteristics, and Challenges 3

and tackle the urban issues such as traffic congestion, energy consumption,
etc. Smartphones play an important role in urban computing. On one hand,
the interaction between humans and the urban environment is reflected by the
smartphone and its connection to cellular towers and environment wifis. The
analysis of these data could help urban planning such as gleaning the underlying
problems in transportation networks [70], discovering the functional regions
and the city boundary [47, 68], etc. One the other hand, smartphone data are
used to identify users’ transportation modes. This leads to applications in urban
transportation survey [40], daily traffic monitor [67], public transportation system
design [35, 57], etc. A full survey of urban computing can be found in [71].
• Healthcare. Mobile mining solution is also used in healthcare related fields. In
the individual level, the activity recognition and travel mode identification using
smartphones could reveal the user’s living style such as the working hours of the
user, the active status of the user, the main transportation tools s/he is using, etc.
The activity recognition can also help in elderly care such as fall detection [26]
and rehabilitation assistant. More and more health related smartphone apps are
developed and launched with latest technologies that assist users in monitoring
their sleep quality [1], logging the walking steps [2], etc. In the aggregation level,
the mobile mining techniques provide health related research useful information
such as public physical activities [50].
• Location-based search and advertising. Mobile mining is heavily used in
location based services such as maps, navigation, and social search (e.g. waze,
yelp, and foursquare). Location can also assist more accurate marketing and
advertising [18, 60]. For example, digital advertisement uses mobile mining
techniques to target audiences by learning the patterns of users’ behaviors such
as transportation behavior and social behavior [17, 21, 36, 45, 46].
• Privacy and security. Unfortunately, mobile data mining is also used in
malicious ways such as probing users’ privacy, or stealing information. For
example, through the vast data of some smartphone usage, one can accurately
infer the activities or locations of users [19, 41]. Some mobile malware uses
mobile mining technology to “learn” the user’s keyboard input [64]. This poses
challenges in technology related legislation.
In this book, we mainly focus on the application of urban computing. To be spe-
cific, when presenting the ideas and results, we focus on the scenarios of identifying
users’ travel modes in urban transportation with smartphone sensors. Meanwhile,
the rationale behind is applicable to the other scenarios and applications.

1.3 Steps, Characteristics, and Challenges

As shown in Fig. 1.1, there are three key steps for developing a typical mobile
data mining application, i.e., (1) data capturing and preprocessing, (2) feature
engineering, and (3) modeling. The applications sometimes provide feedback to the
data capturing step so that the model can be updated.
4 1 Introduction

Applications:
• Urban Computing
• Healthcare
• Location-based
Services, social, etc.

Data Capturing Feature Modeling


& Preprocessing Engineering

Fig. 1.1 Typical steps of mobile data mining

The data capturing step aims to collect and transform the raw mobile data to its
ready-to-use form. This step is also known as ETL (i.e., extraction, transformation,
and loadling). The raw mobile data are extracted from various sources, transformed
into a clean format, and then loaded into the warehouse where the mining activities
take place. For the feature engineering step, the key is to design the “right”
features for specific tasks. After the features are extracted, the modeling step uses
machine learning models such as classifiers or regressors to make the predictions or
decisions.
Since the data are collected via smartphones and the algorithms or methods
are executed on the smartphones as well, mobile data mining needs to pay
special attention to the balance of factors such as accuracy, network stability,
bandwidth availability, storage capacity, computational time, response time, and
battery capacity. For example, continuously sensing may achieve higher accuracy
while it would quickly drain the battery.
Stemming from the three key steps in Fig. 1.1, we summarize the following
key challenges related to (C1) data capturing and preprocessing, (C2) feature
engineering, and (C3) model training and adaptation.
In data capturing and preprocessing, since different activities tend to have
different characteristics of motion patterns (e.g., speed variations, acceleration rates,
and rotations) and even the environmental patterns (e.g., magnetic field change
and ambient air pressure), it is important to select the most suitable sensors for
specific tasks. For example, the accelerometer sensor, as the exclusive data source
in most existing smartphone-based activity recognition research, is inadequate to
differentiate some travel modes such as driving and taking subway. Moreover, the
collected data often accompany with various noises which might overweigh the
discriminative power.
In feature engineering, the feature extraction needs to balance a number of
potentially conflicting factors such as the recognition accuracy, the computational
time, the response time, and the battery consumption. For example, in order to
segment the raw sensor readings (which are essentially time series data), we need
to decide the appropriate sampling rate and segmentation length. A longer segment
might lead to more powerful features (e.g., the discriminative FFT coefficients), yet
1.4 Roadmap 5

it also requires more computational time to extract such features and provide online
responses. In general, it is desirable to examine all the available sensors to have
more discriminative features. However, it inevitably comes with a cost in terms of
the battery consumption.
In modeling, the main challenges are model adaption and battery consumption.
The model adaption concerns the following two major questions: (1) how to adapt
a model which might be trained on a generic population to a specific user, and
(2) how to update a model efficiently over time to accommodate newly collected
labeled data. When answering these two questions, we need to always keep in
mind the challenges of battery consumption. Consider the case of detecting whether
the user is driving or not. Some drives may drive cautiously, while others might
drive more aggressively with frequent and sudden accelerations and decelerations.
Therefore, the detection model should be sufficiently adaptive to different users,
especially under the constraints that the labeled data for each user are not sufficient
in many real scenarios. Additionally, when the valuable labeled data are available in
an online fashion, it is more appealing to update the model accordingly instead of
retraining the model.

1.4 Roadmap

In response to the above challenges of mobile data mining, the organization of this
book is summarized in Fig. 1.2.
Chapter 2 introduces the data capturing and data processing. For data capturing,
we illustrate how to collect the data via a smartphone App. For data processing, we
first analyze the typical patterns from the collected data, and then provide a set of
comprehensive denoising methods. The output of this step are the time series data
of different sensors’ readings.

Task 1 Task 2 Task 3


Data Capturing and Feature Engineering Model Learning
Preprocessing

Data Hierarchical
Data Capturing Segmentation Model

Data Personalized
Data Feature Model
Preprocessing Extraction
Online
Model

Fig. 1.2 The roadmap


6 1 Introduction

Chapter 3 describes the data segmentation and feature extraction methods that
carefully balance between the prediction accuracy, the online response time, and the
battery consumption. We first slice the time series data into data segments and then
extract the most discriminative features from these segments. Meanwhile, special
considerations should be placed on the balance of effectiveness and efficiency.
After the features are properly extracted, Chaps. 4–6 present three learning
models to accommodate different situations to save energy consumption, to provide
personalized treatment, and to update the model in an online fashion, respectively.
In particular, Chap. 4 realizes that not all mobile data mining tasks require all the
features, based on which it introduces a hierarchical learning model to save energy
consumption. Chapter 5 tackles the personalization challenge by appropriately
“borrowing” the data from users whose data are similar to current user. Chapter 6
describes the online learning model to update the learned model when a small
portion of new labeled data arrive. In these three chapters, we take the travel
mode detection scenario as an example with the goal of recognizing the following
travel modes: driving a car, walking, jogging, bicycling, taking a bus, and taking a
subway.
Chapter 2
Data Capturing and Processing

Abstract The first step towards mobile data mining is collecting smartphone
sensors’ readings, and processing the raw data in order to remove various noises.
The key questions that need to be answered during data capturing and processing
include: what data should be collected and how to collect such data, and what are
the characteristic patterns behind these data and how to clean the data so that these
patterns can be easily identified. In this chapter, we first introduce the smartphone
sensors and their readings. Next, to facilitate discussions, we present the details of
data collection and data denoising with an example of travel mode detection.

2.1 Smartphone Sensors

Data capturing is the process of using the smartphones to record data. These data
can be the smartphone sensors’ readings, the activity logs by certain smartphone
apps that record how the user is interacting with his/her phone, etc. In this book, we
mainly focus on the smartphone sensors’ readings. The smartphone sensors can be
classified into four categories [4]: motion sensors, environmental sensors, position
sensors, and connection sensors.
• Motion Sensors. Motion sensors measure acceleration forces and rotational
forces along three axes of the phone’s coordinates. This category includes
accelerometers, gravity sensors, gyroscopes, and rotational vector sensors.
• Environmental Sensors. Sensors in this category measure various environmen-
tal parameters, such as ambient air temperature and pressure, illumination, and
humidity. This category includes barometers, photometers, and thermometers.
• Position Sensors. Position sensors measure the physical position of a device.
This category includes orientation sensors and magnetometers.
• Connection Sensors. Connection sensors provide the solutions for smartphones
to connect and interact with other devices via various protocols. This category
includes Bluetooth, GPS sensors, wireless sensors, standard cellular connection
modulars.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 7


Y. Yao et al., Mobile Data Mining, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02101-6_2
8 2 Data Capturing and Processing

Table 2.1 A summary of smartphone sensors


Sensor name Data collected Dimensions Unit
Accelerometer Acceleration x, y, z g-force
Gravity sensor Gravity x, y, z m/s2
Gyroscope Rotation rate x, y, z, rad/s
x_calibration,
y_calibration,
z_calibration
Magnetometer Magnetic field x, y, z, µT
x_calibration,
y_calibration,
z_calibration
Barometer Ambient air pressure 1 hPa
Rotation Sensor Rotation degree Azimuch: rotation Degree
around z axis
(y axis pointing to magnetic Pitch: rotation around
x axis
north as the default) Roll: rotation around
y axis
Proximity sensor Relative distance from an 1 cm
object to the view screen of a
device
Light sensor The ambient light level 1 lx
Humidity sensor The relative ambient humidity 1 Percentage
Temperature sensor Ambient temperature 1 Celsius
GPS sensor Geographical description of Latitude, longitude, Degree, m/s
current location and estimated speed
speed

A summary of the smartphone sensors and their sensing data are shown in
Table 2.1. The data range and resolution are different from phone to phone. Some
sensors may have very high resolution and cost more, while some others return an
estimated result indicating the level (e.g., some proximity sensors return a binary
result indicating far or near to the user’s face).

2.2 Data Collection

In data capturing, the main question to answer is how to collect data and what to
collect. The answer to this question depends on the specific mobile data mining task.
For example, the accelerometer data and GPS/GSM data are the main data sources
in most of the existing smartphone-based travel mode detection systems [29].
However, such data are not only sensitive as they reveal the users’ locations, but
also unstable and even inapplicable in certain scenarios such as the underground
2.2 Data Collection 9

transportation. Moreover, the accelerometer alone is often inadequate to effectively


distinguish all travel modes. For example, in wheeled travel modes (e.g., buses, cars,
and subways), travelers are sitting in their seats for most of the time, resulting very
similar accelerometer readings. Therefore, the data from multiple sensors usually
need to be collected for a given task.
In practice, the data are collected by mobile apps, and researchers start with
developing their own apps with volunteers to record the sensors’ data as well as the
labels. In this section, we take travel mode detection as an example, and illustrate
how to collect the suitable sensor data for this task.
To decide which sensors’ data should be collected, we first need to understand the
typical patterns from the data. The accelerometer data collected during jogging fluc-
tuate more heavily than in other travel modes, and such data are the most frequently
used sensor data in smartphone based activity recognition. The ambient air pressure
detected by barometers largely depends on the space of the transportation tools,
and other factors such as the air conditioner, door opening and closing, number of
passengers, etc. Therefore, the air pressure detected during traveling with buses has
a smaller mean value than that of traveling with cars. The magnetometer provides
a good indicator of different patterns related to the environment’s magnetic field
and its changes during travel. For example, a subway system uses magnet to brake,
and the magnetic field readings show some oscillatory patterns while traveling on
subways. Also, there are more mobile devices on a bus than in a car which would
also cause the change in the detected magnetic field. All these differences are
revealed in the magnetometer readings and thus can be leveraged to identify the
travel mode.
We summarize the collected data for travel mode detection as follows.
Accelerometer Accelerometer readings measure the changes in velocity along the
x, y, and z axes of the cell phone, as is shown in Fig. 2.1. Accelerometer provides an
important reference to detect the pattern of a user’s body movement.
Gravity Sensor Gravity sensor readings return the gravity as measured along each
axis of the cell phone. If the phone is put on the table with y axis facing the sky,
the reading on y axis would be roughly −9.8 m/s2 while the readings on the other
2 axes would be around 0.0 m/s2 .
Barometer Barometer readings return the detected ambient air pressure. In [42],
Muralidharan et al. conducted an experiment showing that the pressure detected by
the smartphone barometer would change with the building structure and type, and
such a pattern is able to be learned. It can also be used as a discriminative factor in
other mobile data mining tasks such as travel mode detection.
Gyroscope The gyroscope measures the rate of rotation around the three axes.
Figure 2.2 shows the standard direction of measures for rotation along x, y and
z axes.
Light Sensor It measures the ambient light level in SI lux units. In Android phones
this value can be directly obtained [5]. In iPhone it is discouraged to use [10];
10 2 Data Capturing and Processing

Fig. 2.1 Acceleration


measure of iPhone [8]

Fig. 2.2 Rotation measure of


iPhone [8]
2.2 Data Collection 11

therefore, we use screen brightness reading which is the brightness level of the
screen instead [9]. This reading is adjusted by the ambient light level when the
phone is unlocked and thus it is similar to the light sensor.
Magnetometer Magnetometer measures the earth’s geomagnetic field. The smart-
phones provide both raw readings of the magnetic field as well as the calibrated
readings. The calibrated magnetic field usually filters out the bias introduced by
the device and, in some cases, its surrounding fields [6, 7]. The magnetometer also
returns the hard iron bias values separately for customized calibration.
In all the experimental results shown in this book, we use the data collected in the
past few years. Specially, we collect the data three times. The first time was in the
July of 2014, the second time data collection happened in December 2014, and the
last one happened in July–August 2016. In total, we have 16 volunteers collecting
data in Buffalo, NY, New York City (NYC), NY, and College Station (CS), TX,
while traveling with six major travel modes. The collected data have variation in
user’s gender, travel city, travel season, as well as the phone models. The sensors
and their sensing settings are shown in Table 2.2 and the data details for each mode
are shown in Table 2.3.

Table 2.2 Sensors’ setting


Sensor used Data name Freq. Dimensions
Accelerometer Acceleration (m/s2 ) 16 Hz x, y, z
Gravity sensor Gravity (m/s2 ) 16 Hz x, y, z
Gyroscope Rotation rate (rad/s) 16 Hz x, y, z,
xcalib ,
ycalib ,
zcalib
Magnetometer Magnetic field (µT) 1 Hz x, y, z
xcalib ,
ycalib ,
zcalib
Barometer Ambient air pressure (hPa) 1 Hz 1
Light sensor Ambient light level (lx) 1 Hz 1

Table 2.3 Data collection details


Mode #Samples Duration(min.) Gender dist. City dist.
Bike 20,606 72.1 1 female, 2 males NYC, Buffalo.
Bus 44,080 147 1 female, 3 males NYC, Buffalo
Car 227,967 760 6 females, 6 males NYC, Buffalo, CS
Jog 16,838 56.2 2 females, 5 males NYC, Buffalo, CS
Subway 72,643 242.1 6 females, 3 males NYC, Buffalo
Walk 95,701 319 7 females, 5 males NYC, Buffalo, CS
12 2 Data Capturing and Processing

2.3 Data Denoising

The raw data collected from sensors are often accompanied with various noises.
Without being appropriately denoised, the negative impact of such noises might
outweigh the additional discriminative power embedded in the sensors. Therefore,
the main task in data preprocessing is to minimize the noises in the raw sensor
readings. Here, we provide a comprehensive set of techniques to remove various
noises in the raw data, as summarized in Table 2.4.
Denoising #1: Data Rotation Among all the sensors’ readings we collected,
acceleration is measured along the phone axes whose coordinates are determined by
the phone’s position and heading direction. Since it is unrealistic to coordinate all the
travelers to have the same phone position and heading direction, we need to rotate
the readings back to a standard coordinate system before any further calculation.
Here, we define the standard coordinate system to be y axis perpendicular to the
earth pointing toward the sky and z axis pointing to the magnetic north. The x axis
is determined in a right-handed coordinate system. Magnetic field and gravity are
used to rotate the readings from the phone’s coordinates to the standard coordinates.
The readings of both calibrated and uncalibrated ambient magnetic field
are accessible. According to [49], the differences between calibrated and
uncalibrated magnetic field data are as follows. The hard iron calibration is
reported separately in uncalibrated magnetic field, while calibrated reading includes
the calibration in measurement. For example, the calibrated and uncalibrated
magnetic field measures at the same time by one of our smartphones are
shown in Table 2.5. The TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD indicates the ambient
magnetic field measured in 3-dimensional space at time tick 633. The
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD_UNCALIBRATED indicates the hard iron calibrated
magnetic field in three dimensions, as well as the bias that is calibrated along each
dimension.
We denote the magnetic field vector by M, and the magnetic field magnitude is
calculated as

M = Mx 2 + My 2 + Mz 2 (2.1)

Table 2.4 Denoising techniques and the targeted noises


De-noising techniques Noises to remove
Data rotation Noises caused by phones’ different positions and heading directions
Winsorization The outliers in sensor reading such as spikes in data, or noises caused
by other sudden events (e.g. phone dropped to the floor)
Gaussian smoothing The high frequency noise (e.g. white noise naturally exists in sensors)
Normalization Difference in data scale of different data sources
2.3 Data Denoising 13

Table 2.5 Magnetic field readings


Sensor field Timestamp Value name Value(µT)
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD_UNCALIBRATED 633 xuncalib 100.7734
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD_UNCALIBRATED 633 yuncalib −53.8651
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD_UNCALIBRATED 633 zuncalib 461.7340
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD_UNCALIBRATED 633 xbias 69.1016
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD_UNCALIBRATED 633 ybias −26.0590
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD_UNCALIBRATED 633 zbias 497.7585
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD 633 xcalib 31.6711
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD 633 ycalib −27.8061
TYPE_MAGNETIC_FIELD 633 zcalib −36.0245

If we calculate the calibrated magnetic field using xcalib , ycalib , zcalib , the magni-
tude is 55.44 µT, which is close to the value 53.723 µT measured and recorded by
Center NGD [15] in Buffalo on the day our data were collected. We use this fact for
the first step of phone coordinates rotation.
Gravity reading is then used for the rotation. Gravity reading is recorded along
three axes. For example, a sample of gravity reading in the format of [t, x, y, z] is
[677, −0.850, 5.090, 8.339]. We denote the gravity by G, and the gravity magnitude
is calculated by

G = Gx 2 + Gy 2 + Gz 2 (2.2)

The gravity magnitude of the sample reading is 9.807 m/s2 , which is close to the
gravity 9.804 m/s2 of Buffalo recorded in [44].
We denote the raw gravity and magnetic field reading by G0 = [Gx 0 , Gy 0 , Gz 0 ]
and M0 = [Mx 0 , My 0 , Mz 0 ]. In the standard coordinate system, the earth gravity is

Gs = [Gx s , Gy s , Gz s ] where Gx s = 0, Gy s = Gx 20 + Gy 20 + Gz 20 , Gz s = 0,
and magnetic field is Ms = [Mx s , My s , Mz s ], where Mx s = 0, My s = 0, Mz s =

Mx 20 + My 20 + Mz 20 . R1 and R2 are the two rotation matrices we use. R1 rotates
the raw gravity reading G0 to the Earth gravity Gs , and R2 rotates the raw reading
of magnetic field M0 to Ms , i.e.,

0 = Gs
R1 GT T

0 = Ms
R2 MT T
(2.3)

Using the above equations, we can obtain R1 and R2 . Now assume we have the raw
reading of acceleration A0 at the same time. We use the following equation to rotate
the acceleration into the standard coordination value As .

0 = As
R2 R1 AT T
(2.4)

By rotation, the sensor reading will be position-independent.


14 2 Data Capturing and Processing

Fig. 2.3 Winsorization of acceleration data (5% along the y axis)

Denoising #2: Winsorization The winsorization is used to reduce the possible


spurious outliers in the data. Figure 2.3 shows the distribution of acceleration data
along y axis while traveling by a car. The top plot is the sorted acceleration in
the ascending order. The dash lines indicate the 2.5% cutting point at both sides.
The bottom plot is the unsorted raw acceleration along time. The two horizontal
solid lines indicate the upper bound (97.5%) and the lower bound (2.5%) of the
data values. We can see that in the top plot, the dash lines cut at the point where
the data curve on the left side starts to change from very steep to very flat, and
on the right side after the dash line it starts to change from very flat to very steep.
Meanwhile, in the bottom plot, the horizontal lines keep the characteristics of the
curve and only eliminate some outliers and noises. We have a similar observation in
most of our data. Therefore, we recommend to chose 5% as the default fraction for
winsorization.
Denoising #3: Gaussian Smoothing In winsorization, we eliminate the overall
outliers within the data. To analyze the data value’s change in a relatively longer
time period, it is also important to eliminate the white noise and high frequency
fluctuation. For example, if we want to learn the direction change during moving
2.3 Data Denoising 15

Fig. 2.4 Gaussian smoothed rotation rate

(e.g., when the car takes a turn, which direction it turns to), we need to analyze the
readings from the rotation sensor (e.g., the red dash line in Fig. 2.4). Roughly, the
readings contain three kinds of changes: the white noise in highest frequency, the
fluctuation in second highest frequency which is caused by the phone’s movement
together with the carrier’s body, and the trend change which includes the average
value increasing/decreasing and the peak points. While analyzing the readings’ trend
change, we would like to eliminate the first two kinds of changes and keep the
third one. The solution is to use Gaussian filter to smooth the data. It works as a
low-pass filter and attenuates high frequency signal periods in the data. We use the
segment length as the smooth parameter σ . The blue dash line in Fig. 2.4 includes
the results after smoothing. We can see that the filtration drops all the high frequency
oscillations most of which come from noises, and leaves only the main up and down
trends. We compared the smoothed line with the recorded actual turning events. All
the local extrema (1–5 points marked with a yellow line) in Fig. 2.4 are when the
turning events actually happened.
Denoising #4: Normalization Finally, data collected by different sensors measuring
different aspects of traveling events are quite diversified in both range and value.
For example, the accelerometer data are between ±40 m/s2 , while the magnitude
of magnetic field could reach 500 mT. In order to compare the data from different
sensors, we normalize them between 0 and 1.
16 2 Data Capturing and Processing

2.4 Summary

In this chapter, we first discuss the available sensors in smartphones and the
corresponding data that can be collected from these sensors. After that, we take the
travel mode detection problem as an example, and illustrate how to determine the
possibly useful sensors for this task. We also provide a set of denoising techniques
for preprocessing the collected data. Most of the discussed techniques are applicable
to other data mining tasks.
Chapter 3
Feature Engineering

Abstract So far, the collected data are time series data of different sensors’ read-
ings. To make use of these time series in the following learning models, we usually
need to first slice the time series data into data segments, and then extract features
from these segments. Meanwhile, the data segmentation and feature extraction also
affect the aspects like energy efficiency, model accuracy, and response time. In
this chapter, we first discuss the data segmentation method, and then introduce the
feature extraction which extracts features from a segment with the principle that the
extracted features should be informative and discriminative. To further save time,
we also discuss the feature selection method which selects a subset of the features
for the current task.

3.1 Data Segmentation

In this book, we refer to the readings from all sensors at a single time as one “data
sample”. It is the unit data generated at one time tick, and a data segment contains
one or more data samples. The key challenge in data segmentation is to find a proper
way to slice the data providing the sensor sampling rate. If the length of a segment
is too short, it might be less informative and result in a less effective model. On the
other hand, increasing the length of the data segments means the system requires
more time to obtain enough readings.
Figure 3.1 illustrates the commonly used slide-window segmentation, which
leads to a fast response while preserving the information of each segment. To
construct one segment, the slide-window mechanism extends the newly registered
data into a segment by including a certain amount of the most recent cached data. As
shown in the figure, if a segment consists of three data samples and is configured to
take two historical data samples, at time t new data sample “Samplet ” is combined
with the historical data “Samplet−2 ” and “Samplet−1 ”. The segmentation window
slides forward as the “Samplet+1 ” comes in at time t + 1. “Samplet−1 ” and
“Samplet ” are combined with “Samplet+1 ” as a new segment. The ratio of the
new data and the cached data in a segment is configurable. The use of cached data

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 17


Y. Yao et al., Mobile Data Mining, SpringerBriefs in Computer Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02101-6_3
18 3 Feature Engineering

Server New Data Sending to Server

Last Segment
 t–2  t–1  t  t+1

Time-Window for a Training Segment at Time t

Time-Window for a Training Segment at Time


t+1

Fig. 3.1 Using slide window for data segmentation

will serve to avoid the boundary issue in the data. Without it, some discriminative
patterns might be lost simply because a significant amount of consecutive readings
would be divided into separate segments.
Based on the slide-window segmentation, there are two factors for a proper length
of a data segment: the sampling rate and the cached data size. As for the sampling
rate, it determines how long it takes to collect enough data for one segment and how
much information one segment contains. For example, if smartphone A collects data
with sampling rate 200 ms/reading and smartphone B collects data with sampling
rate 100 ms/reading, a segment of length 10 contains information within 2 s of phone
A while it contains information within 1 s of phone B. The cached data size, on the
other side, determines how much new information is included in one segment. The
larger the ratio of cached data, the shorter it takes to form a data segment. However,
it also places more delay for event detection with larger ratio of cached data.

3.2 Feature Extraction

In feature extraction, the constraints are the computational cost and the battery con-
sumption. This is especially true when the features are extracted from multimodality
sensors and the sensing task for smartphones is battery draining. Following data
segmentation, we can extract features in both time and frequency domains. Table 3.1
summarizes the mostly used features in mobile data mining literature.
Take the travel mode detection task as an example. This task involves the raw
data including acceleration, magnetic field, and air pressure data. Acceleration and
magnetic field data can be analyzed in both the time domain and the frequency
domain. Pressure is analyzed in the time domain only since the main change in
ambient air pressure largely depends on the space of the transportation tools and
the statistical features such as max, min, standard deviation, mean would be enough
to describe the characteristics. Then, based on the feature extraction methods in
Table 3.1, we can extract various features for different mobile data mining tasks.
Take the travel mode detection problem as an example, we can extract 161 features
as summarized in Table 3.2.
3.3 Feature Analysis and Sensor Selection 19

Table 3.1 Feature extraction in mobile data mining


Category Features Description
Time Mean, max, min, std The mean, max, minimum values and the
domain standard deviation of the data segment
features
Correlation The correlation of data among each axis pair
Signal-magnitude area SMA is calculated as the sum of the
magnitude of the three axes acceleration
within the segment window [32]
Average resultant acceleration ARA is the average of the square root of the
sum of the values of each axis
Frequency Energy Calculated as the sum of the squared Discrete
domain Fourier transform (DFT) component
features magnitudes. Ravi in [48] uses the normalized
energy divided by the window length
Entropy Calculated as the normalized information
entropy of the DFT components, and it helps
in discriminating the activities with the similar
energy features [11]
Time between peak The time between the peaks in the sinusoidal
waves [33]
Binned distribution This feature is essentially the histogram of the
FFT

3.3 Feature Analysis and Sensor Selection

For travel mode detection, while all the 161 extracted features in Table 3.2 seem
to be effective in distinguishing different travel modes, it comes with a cost in
terms of both the computation and battery consumption. Intuitively, not all the travel
modes need all the features in learning. For example, the travel modes that involve
more motion activities might rely on motion based features more than others in
classification. In this section, we provide a feature selection method to analyze the
feature importance by applying group lasso in the classification model to explore
the possibilities of eliminating the sensor usage. That is, we put the features from
the same sensor into one group, and select the groups that are potentially useful for
the prediction task.
The lasso is a very popular technique for variable selection for high dimensional
data. Group lasso [69] is a generalization of the lasso for doing group-wise variable
selection. For a given dataset that contains the data samples (denoted by X) and the
corresponding label vectors (denoted by y), group lasso aims to solve the penalized
least squares,

√ L
1
β 22 + λ
min y − Xβ β (k) 2 , λ > 0,
pk β (3.1)
β 2
l=1
20 3 Feature Engineering

Table 3.2 Extracted features for travel mode detection


Name Description
xmax , xmin , xstd , xavg The statistical description of acceleration data segments along
ymax , ymin , ystd , yavg x, y and z axes, respectively
zmax , zmin , zstd , zavg
xoffset , yoffset , zoffset The offset of the DFT results of the x, y and z axes of
acceleration data segment, respectively
xfreq , yfreq , zfreq The principle frequency of the acceleration along x, y and z
axis, respectively
xestd , yestd , zestd The standard deviation of energy vector calculated from x, y
and z axes acceleration of the data segments, respectively
x1 , x2 , ..., x10 Histogram of normalized energy of the acceleration along x, y
y1 , y2 , ..., y10 and z axes of the data segment, respectively
z1 , z2 , ..., z10
xpk1 , xpk2 , xpk3 , xpk4 , The time zone (indexes of time tick) of the top four data peaks
ypk1 , ypk2 , ypk3 , ypk4 , of x, y and z axes acceleration, respectively
zpk1 , zpk2 , zpk3 , zpk4
amax , amin , astd , aavg The statistical description of total acceleration
aoffset , afreq , aestd The offset,principle frequency and standard deviation of the
DFT analysis on total acceleration
a1 , a2 , ..., a10 Histogram of normalized energy of the total acceleration
apk1 , apk2 , apk3 , apk4 The time zone (indexes of time tick) of the top four data peaks
of total acceleration
rx max , rx min , rx std , rx avg The statistical description of rotation data segments along x, y
ry max , ry min , ry std , ry avg and z axes, respectively
rzmax , rzmin , rzstd , rzavg
rx offset , ry offset , rzoffset The offset of the DFT results of the x, y and z axes of rotation
data segment, respectively
rx freq , ry freq , rzfreq The principle frequency of the rotation along x, y and z axis,
respectively
rxestd , ryestd , rzestd The standard deviation of energy vector calculated from x, y
and z axes rotation of the data segments, respectively
rx1 , rx2 , ..., rx10 Histogram of normalized energy of the rotation along x, y and
ry1 , ry2 , ..., ry10 z axes of the data segment, respectively
rz1 , rz2 , ..., rz10
rxpk1 , rxpk2 , rxpk3 , rxpk4 , The time zone (indexes of time tick) of the top four data peaks
rypk1 , rypk2 , rypk3 , rypk4 , of x, y and z axes rotation data, respectively
rzpk1 , rzpk2 , rzpk3 , rzpk4
pmax , pmin , pstd , pavg The statistical description of the ambient air pressure data
segment from the smartphone’s barometer
memax , memin , mestd , meavg The statistical description of the magnetic field data segment
from the smartphone’s magnetometer
magoffset The offset of the DFT result of the magnetic field data segment
lmax , lmin , lstd , lavg The statistical description of the environment brightness from
the smartphone’s light sensor
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Bull and the Cockpit probably whistled the tune as they wended their
way homeward to crab-apple ale and spiced gingerbread.
Next to the Champions of Christendom, the King’s Knight Champion
of England is perhaps the most important personage—in the point of
view of chivalry. I think it is some French author who has said, that
revolutions resemble the game of chess, where the pawns or pieces
(les pions) may cause the ruin of the king, save him, or take his
place. Now the champ pion, as this French remark reminds me, is
nothing more than the field pion, pawn, or piece, put forward to fight
in the king’s quarrel.
The family of the Champion of England bears, it may be observed,
exactly the name which suits a calling so derived. The appellation
“Dymoke” is derived from De Umbrosâ Quercu; I should rather say it
is the translation of it; and Harry De Umbrosâ Quercu is only Harry of
the Shady or Dim Oak, a very apt dwelling-place and name for one
whose chief profession was that of field-pawn to the king.
This derivation or adaptation of names from original Latin surnames
is common enough, and some amusing pages might be written on
the matter, in addition to what has been so cleverly put together by
Mr. Mark Anthony Lower, in his volume devoted especially to an
elucidation of English surnames.
The royal champions came in with the Conquest. The Norman dukes
had theirs in the family of Marmion—ancestors of that Marmion of Sir
Walter Scott’s, who commits forgery, like a common knave of more
degenerate times. The Conqueror conferred sundry broad lands in
England on his champions; among others, the lands adjacent to, as
well as the castle of Tamworth. Near this place was the first nunnery
established in this country. The occupants were the nuns of St.
Edith, at Polesworth. Robert de Marmion used the ladies very
“cavalierly,” ejected them from their house, and deprived them of
their property. But such victims had a wonderfully clever way of
recovering their own.
My readers may possibly remember how a certain Eastern potentate
injured the church, disgusted the Christians generally, and irritated
especially that Simeon Stylites who sat on the summit of a pillar,
night and day, and never moved from his abiding-place. The offender
had a vision, in which he not only saw the indignant Simeon, but was
cudgelled almost into pulp by the simulacre of that saint. I very much
doubt if Simeon himself was in his airy dwelling-place at that
particular hour of the night. I was reminded of this by what happened
to the duke’s champion, Robert de Marmion. He was roused from a
deep sleep by the vision of a stout lady, who announced herself as
the wronged St. Edith, and who proceeded to show her opinion of De
Marmion’s conduct toward her nuns, by pommelling his ribs with her
crosier, until she had covered his side with bruises, and himself with
repentance. What strong-armed young monk played St. Edith that
night, it is impossible to say; but that he enacted the part
successfully, is seen from the fact that Robert brought back the
ladies to Polesworth, and made ample restitution of all of which they
had been deprived. The nuns, in return, engaged with alacrity to inter
all defunct Marmions within the chapter-house of their abbey, for
nothing.
With the manor of Tamworth in Warwickshire, Marmion held that of
Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire. The latter was held of the King by grand
sergeantry, “to perform the office of champion at the King’s
coronation.” At his death he was succeeded by a son of the same
Christian name, who served the monks of Chester precisely as his
sire had treated the nuns at Polesworth. This second Robert fortified
his ill-acquired prize—the priory; but happening to fall into one of the
newly-made ditches, when inspecting the fortifications, a soldier of
the Earl of Chester killed him, without difficulty, as he lay with broken
hip and thigh, at the bottom of the fosse. The next successor, a third
Robert, was something of a judge, with a dash of the warrior, too,
and he divided his estates between two sons, both Roberts, by
different mothers. The eldest son and chief possessor, after a
bustling and emphatically “battling” life, was succeeded by his son
Philip, who fell into some trouble in the reign of Henry III. for
presuming to act as a judge or justice of the peace, without being
duly commissioned. This Philip was, nevertheless, one of the most
faithful servants to a king who found so many faithless; and if honors
were heaped upon him in consequence, he fairly merited them all.
He was happy, too, in marriage, for he espoused a lady sole heiress
to a large estate, and who brought him four daughters, co-heiresses
to the paternal and maternal lands of the Marmions and the Kilpecs.
This, however, is wandering. Let us once more return to orderly
illustration. In St. George I have shown how pure romance deals with
a hero. In the next chapter I will endeavor to show in what spirit the
lives and actions of real English heroes have been treated by native
historians. In so doing, I will recount the story of Sir Guy of Warwick,
after their fashion, with original illustrations and “modern instances.”
SIR GUY OF WARWICK,
AND WHAT BEFELL HIM.

“His desires
Are higher than his state, and his deserts
Not much short of the most he can desire.”
Chapman’s Byron’s Conspiracy.

The Christian name of Guy was once an exceedingly popular name


in the county of York. I have never heard a reason assigned for this,
but I think it may have originated in admiration of the deeds and the
man whose appellation and reputation have survived to our times. I
do not allude to Guy Faux; that young gentleman was the Father of
Perverts, but by no means the first of the Guys.
The “Master Guy” of whom I am treating here, or, rather, about to
treat, was a youth whose family originally came from
Northumberland. That family was, in one sense, more noble than the
imperial family of Muscovy, for its members boasted not only of good
principles, but of sound teeth.
The teeth and principles of the Romanoffs are known to be in a
distressing state of dilapidation.
Well; these Northumbrian Guys having lived extremely fast, and
being compelled to compound with their creditors, by plundering the
latter, and paying them zero in the pound, migrated southward, and
finally settled in Warwickshire. Now, the head of the house had a
considerable share of common sense about him, and after much
suffering in a state of shabby gentility, he not only sent his daughters
out to earn their own livelihood, but, to the intense disgust of his
spouse, hired himself as steward to that noble gentleman the Earl of
Warwick. “My blood is as good as ever it was,” said he to the fine
lady his wife. “It is the blood of an upper servant,” cried she, “and my
father’s daughter is the spouse of a flunkey.”
The husband was not discouraged; and he not only opened his office
in his patron’s castle but he took his only son with him, and made
him his first clerk. This son’s name was Guy; and he was rather
given to bird-catching, hare-snaring, and “gentism” generally. He had
been a precocious youth from some months previous to his birth,
and had given his lady-mother such horrid annoyance, that she was
always dreaming of battles, fiery-cars, strong-smelling dragons, and
the wrathful Mars. “Well,” she used to remark to her female friends,
while the gentlemen were over their wine, “I expect that this boy”
(she had made up her mind to that) “will make a noise in the world,
draw bills upon his father, and be the terror of maid-servants. Why,
do you know——” and here she became confidential, and I do not
feel authorized to repeat what she then communicated.
But Master Guy, the “little stranger” alluded to, proved better than
was expected. He might have been considerably worse, and yet
would not have been so bad as maternal prophecy had depicted
him. At eight years ... but I hear you say, “When did all this occur?”
Well, it was in a November’s “Morning Post,” that announcement
was made of the birth; and as to the year, Master Guy has given it
himself in the old metrical romance,

“Two hundred and twenty years and odd,


After our Savior Christ his birth,
When King Athelstan wore the crown,
I livéd here upon the earth.”

At eight years old, I was about to remark, young Guy was the most
insufferable puppy of his district. He won all the prizes for athletic
sports; and by the time he was sixteen there was not a man in all
England who dared accept his challenge to wrestle with both arms,
against him using only one.
It was at this time that he kept his father’s books and a leash of
hounds, with the latter of which he performed such extraordinary
feats, that the Earl of Warwick invited him from the steward’s room to
his own table; where Guy’s father changed his plate, and Master
Guy twitched him by the beard as he did it.
At the head of the earl’s table sat his daughter “Phillis the Fair,” a
lady who, like her namesake in the song, was “sometimes forward,
sometimes coy,” and altogether so sweetly smiling and so beguiling,
that when the earl asked Guy if he would not come and hunt (the
dinner was at 10 a. m.), Guy answered, as the Frenchman did who
could not bear the sport, with a Merci, j’ai été! and affecting an iliac
seizure, hinted at the necessity of staying at home.
The youth forthwith was carried to bed. Phillis sent him a posset, the
earl sent him his own physician; and this learned gentleman, after
much perplexity veiled beneath the most affable and confident
humbug, wrote a prescription which, if it could do the patient no good
would do him no harm. He was a most skilful man, and his patients
almost invariably recovered under this treatment. He occasionally
sacrificed one or two when a consultation was held, and he was
called upon to prescribe secundum artem; but he compensated for
this professional slaying by, in other cases, leaving matters to
Nature, who was the active partner in his firm, and of whose success
he was not in the least degree jealous. So, when he had written the
prescription, Master Guy fell a discoursing of the passion of love,
and that with a completeness and a variety of illustration as though
he were the author of the chapter on that subject in Burton’s
“Anatomy of Melancholy.” The doctor heard him to the end, gently
rubbing one side of his nose the while with the index-finger of his
right hand; and when his patient had concluded, the medical
gentleman smiled, hummed “Phillis is my only joy,” and left the room
with his head nodding like a Chinese Mandarin’s.
By this time the four o’clock sun was making green and gold pillars
of the trees in the neighboring wood, and Guy got up, looked at the
falling leaves, and thought of the autumn of his hopes. He whistled
“Down, derry, down,” with a marked emphasis on the down; but
suddenly his hopes again sprang up, as he beheld Phillis among her
flower-beds, engaged in the healthful occupation which a sublime
poet has given to the heroine whom he names, and whose action he
describes, when he tells us that

“Miss Dinah was a-walking in her garding one day.”


Guy trussed his points, pulled up his hose, set his bonnet smartly on
his head, clapped a bodkin on his thigh, and then walked into the
garden with the air of the once young D’Egville in a ballet, looking
after a nymph—which indeed was a pursuit he was much given to
when he was old D’Egville, and could no longer bound through his
ballets, because he was stiff in the joints.
Guy, of course, went down on one knee, and at once plunged into
the most fiery style of declaration, but Phillis had not read the Mrs.
Chapone of that day for nothing. She brought him back to prose and
propriety, and then the two started afresh, and they did talk! Guy felt
a little “streaked” at first, but he soon recovered his self-possession,
and it would have been edifying for the young mind to have heard
how these two pretty things spoke to, and answered each other in
moral maxims stolen from the top pages of their copy-books. They
poured them out by the score, and the proverbial philosophy they
enunciated was really the origin of the book so named by Martin
Tupper. He took it all from Phillis and Guy, whose descendants, of
the last name, were so famous for their school-books. This I expect
Mr. Tupper will (not) mention in his next edition.
After much profitable interchange of this sort of article, the lady
gently hinted that Master Guy was not indifferent to her, but that he
was of inferior birth, yet of qualities that made him equal with her;
adding, that hitherto he had done little but kill other people’s game,
whereas there were nobler deeds to be accomplished. And then she
bade him go in search of perilous adventures, winding up with the
toast and sentiment, “Master Guy, eagles do not care to catch flies.”
Reader, if you have ever seen the prince of pantomimists, Mr.
Payne, tear the hair of his theatrical wig in a fit of amorous despair,
you may have some idea as to the intensity with which Master Guy
illustrated his own desperation. He stamped the ground with such
energy that all the hitherto quiet aspens fell a-shaking, and their
descendants have ever since maintained the same fashion. Phillis
fell a-crying at this demonstration, and softened considerably. After a
lapse of five minutes, she had blushingly directed Master Guy to
“speak to papa.”
Now, of all horrible interviews, this perhaps is the most horrible.
Nelson used to say that there was only one thing on earth which he
dreaded, and that was dining with a mayor and corporation.
Doubtless it is dreadful, but what is it compared with looking a grave
man in the face, who has no sentiment into him, and whose first
remark is sure to be, “Well, sir, be good enough to tell me—what can
you settle on my daughter? What can you do to secure her
happiness?”
“Well,” said Guy, in reply to this stereotyped remark, “I can kill the
Dun cow on the heath. She has killed many herself who’ve tried the
trick on her; and last night she devoured crops of clover, and twice
as many fields of barley on your lordship’s estate.”
“First kill the cow, and then——,” said the earl with a smile; and
Shakespeare had the echo of this speech in his ear, when he began
the fifth act of his Othello. Now Guy was not easily daunted. If I
cared to make a pun, I might easily have said “cowed,” but in a grave
and edifying narrative this loose method of writing would be
extremely improper. Guy, then, was not a coward—nay, nothing is
hidden under the epithet. He tossed a little in bed that night as he
thought the matter over, and the next morning made sheets of paper
as crumpled as the cow’s horns, as he rejected the plans of assault
he had designed upon them, and sat uncertain as to what he should
do in behoof of his own fortune. He at length determined to go and
visit the terrible animal “incognito.” It is the very word used by one of
the biographers of Guy, an anonymous Northumbrian, who published
the life on a broad sheet, with a picture of Master Guy which might
have frightened the cow, and which is infinitely more ugly. Neither
the black-letter poem, the old play, nor the pamphlets or ballads, use
the term incognito, but all declare that Guy proceeded with much
caution, and a steel cuirass over his jerkin. I mention these things,
because without correctness my narrative would be worthless. I am
not imaginative, and would not embroider a plain suit of fact upon
any account.
Guy’s carefulness is to be proved. Here was a cow that had been
more destructive than ever Red Riding Hood’s Wolf was—that Count
Wolf, who used to snap up young maidens, and lived as careless of
respectability as was to be expected of a man once attached to a
“marching regiment,” and who turned monk. The cow was twelve
feet high, from the hoof to the shoulder, and eighteen feet long, from
the neck to the root of the tail. All the dragons ever heard of had
never been guilty of such devastation to life and property as this
terrible cow. Guy looked at her and did not like her. The cow
detected him and rushed at her prey. Guy was active, attacked her in
front and rear, as the allies did the forts of Bomarsund; very
considerably confused her by burying his battle-axe in her skull;
hung on by her tail as she attempted to fly; and finally gave her the
coup de grace by passing his rapier rapidly and repeatedly through
her especially vulnerable point behind the ear. In proof of the fact,
the scene of the conflict still bears the name of Dunsmore Heath,
and that is a wider basis of proof than many “facts” stand upon, to
which we are required by plodding teachers to give assent.
Besides, there is a rib of this very cow exhibited at Bristol. To be sure
it is not a rib now of a cow, but out of reverence to the antiquity of the
assertion which allegedly makes it so, I think we are bound to
believe what is thus advanced. Not that I do myself, but that is of no
consequence. I have a strong idea that the cow was not a cow, but a
countess (not a Countess Cowper), who made war in her own right,
lived a disreputable life, was as destructive to wealthy young lords as
a Lorette, and won whole estates by cheating at écarté. Guy took a
hand, and beat her.
Poor Master Guy, he was as hardly used as ever Jacob was, and
much he meditated thereupon in the fields at eventide. The stern earl
would by no means give his consent to the marriage of his daughter
with the young champion, until the latter had performed some
doughtier deeds than this. The boy (he was still in his teens) took
heart of grace, divided a crooked sixpence with Phillis, and
straightway sailed for Normandy, where he arrived, after meeting as
many thieves by the way as if he had walked about for a month in
the streets of Dover. But Master Guy killed all he met; there is a
foolish judicial, not to say social, prejudice against our doing the
same with the bandits of Dover. I can not conjecture why; perhaps
they have a privilege under some of the city companies, whereby
they are constituted the legal skinners of all sojourners among them,
carrying filthy lucre.
Guy met in Normandy with the last person he could have expected
to fall in with—no other than the Emperor of Almayne, a marvellously
ubiquitous person to be met with in legends, and frequently
encountered in the seaports of inland towns. The historians are here
a little at issue. One says that Master Guy having found a certain
Dorinda tied to the stake, and awaiting a champion who would stake
his own life for her rescue, inquired the “antecedents” of the position.
Dorinda, it appears, had been as rudely used as young lady possibly
could be, “by the Duke of Blois, his son,” and the duke was so
enraged at Dorinda’s charge against his favorite Otto, that he
condemned her to be burned alive, unless a champion appeared in
time to rescue her by defeating the aforesaid Otto in single combat.
Guy, of course, transacted the little business successfully; spoiled
Otto’s beauty by slashing his nose; and so enchanted Dorinda, that
she never accused her champion of doing aught displeasing to her.
Anxious as I am touching the veracity of this narrative, I have
recorded what biographers state, though not in their own words. But
I must add, that in some of the histories this episode about Dorinda
is altogether omitted, and we only hear of Master Guy appearing in
panoply at a tournament given by the Emperor of Allemagne, in
Normandy—which is much the same, gentle reader, as if I were, at
your cost, to give a concert and ball, with a supper from Farrance’s,
and all, not in my house, but in yours. Nevertheless, in Normandy
the tournament was held, and the paternal Emperor of Allemagne,
having then a daughter, Blanche, of whom he wished to get rid, he
set her up as the prize of the conquering knight in the tournament.
I think I hear you remark something as to the heathenness of the
custom. But it is a custom sacred to these times; and our neighbors
(for of course neither you nor I could condescend to such manners)
get up evening tournaments of whist, quadrilles, and a variety of
singing—of every variety but the good and intelligible, and at these
modern tournaments given for the express purpose which that
respectable old gentleman, the Emperor of Allemagne, had in view
when he opened his lists; the “girls” are the prizes of the carpet-
knights. So gentlemen, faites votre jeu, as the philosopher who
presided at Frescati’s used to say—faites votre jeu, Messieurs; and
go in and win. Perhaps if you read Cowper, you may be the better
armed against loss in such a conflict.
I need not say that Master Guy’s good sword, which gleamed like
lightning in the arena, and rained blows faster than ever Mr.
Blanchard rained them, in terrific Coburg combats, upon the
vulnerable crest of Mr. Bradley—won for him the peerless prize—to
say nothing of a dog and a falcon thrown in. Master Guy rather
ungallantly declined having the lady, though her father would have
given him carte blanche; he looked at her, muttered her name, and
then murmured, “Blanche, as thou art, yet art thou black-a-moor,
compared with my Phillis;”—and with this unchivalric avowal, for it
was a part of chivalry to say a thing and think another, he returned to
England, carrying with him the “Spaniel King’s Charls,” as French
authors write it, and the falcon, with a ring and a perch, like a huge
parroquet.
Master Guy entered Warwick in a “brougham,” as we now might say,
and sorely was he put to it with the uneasy bird. At every lurch of the
vehicle, out flapped the wings, elongated was the neck, and Master
Guy had to play at “dodge” with the falcon, who was intent upon
darting his terrific beak into the cavalier’s nose. At length, however,
the castle was safely reached; the presents were deposited at the
feet of Phillis the Fair, and Guy hoped, like the Peri, and also like that
gentle spirit to be disappointed, that the gates of paradise were
about to open. But not so, Phillis warmly praised his little regard for
that pert minx, Blanche, or Blanc d’Espagne, as she wickedly added;
and she patted the spaniel, and offered sugar to the falcon; and,
after the dinner to which Guy was invited, she intimated in whispers,
that they were both “too young as yet” (not that she believed so), and
that more deeds must be done by Guy, ere the lawyers would be
summoned by her papa to achieve some of their own.
The youthful Guy went forth “reluctant but resolved,” and he would
have sung as he went along,

“Elle a quinze ans, moi j’en ai seize,”


of Sedaine and Grétry, only neither poet nor composer, nor the opera
of Richard Cœur de Lion, had yet appeared to gladden heart and
ear. But the sentiment was there, and perhaps Sedaine knew of it
when he penned the words. However this may be, Master Guy,
though soft of heart, was not so of arm, for on this present cause of
errantry he enacted such deeds that their very enumeration makes
one breathless. His single sword cleared whole forests of hordes of
brigands, through whose sides his trenchant blade passed as easily
as the sabre, when held by Corporal Sutton, through a dead sheep.
Our hero was by no means particular as to what he did, provided he
was doing something; nor what cause he fought for, provided there
were a cause and a fight. Thus we find him aiding the Duke of
Louvain against his old friend the Emperor of Allemagne. He led the
Duke’s forces, slew thousands upon thousands of the enemy, and,
as though he had the luck of a modern Muscovite army, did not lose
more than “one man,” with slight damage to the helmet of a second.
Master Guy, not yet twenty, surpassed the man whom Mr. Thiers
calls “ce pur Anglais,” Mr. Pitt, for he became a prime minister ere he
had attained his majority. In that capacity he negotiated a peace for
the Duke with the Emperor. The two potentates were so satisfied
with the negotiator, that out of compliment they offered him the
command of their united fleet against the Pagan Soldan of
Byzantium. They did not at all expect that he would accept it; but
then they were not aware that Master Guy had much of the spirit
which Sidney Smith, in after-years, discerned in Lord John Russell—
and the enterprising Guy accepted the command of the entire fleet,
with quite an entire confidence.
He did therewith, if chroniclers are to be credited, more than we
might reasonably expect from Lord John Russell, were that
statesman to be in command of a Channel squadron. Having swept
the sea, he rather prematurely, if dates are to be respected, nearly
annihilated Mohammedanism—and he was as invincible and
victorious against every kind of Pagan. It was in the East that he
overthrew in single combat, the giants Colbron and his brother
Mongadora. He was resting after this contest, and leaning like the
well-breathed Hotspur, upon his sword, at the entrance to his tent,
when the Turkish governor Esdalante, approaching him, politely
begged that he might take his head, as he had promised the same to
an Osmanlee lady, who was in a condition of health which might be
imperilled by refusal. Master Guy as politely bade him take it if he
could, and therewith, they went at it “like French falconers,” and Guy
took off the head of his opponent instead of losing his own. This little
matter being settled, Guy challenged the infidel Soldan himself,
putting Christianity against Islamism, on the issue, and thus
professing to decide questions of faith as Galerius did when he left
Olympus and Calvary to depend upon a vote of the Roman senate.
Master Guy, being thrice armed by the justness of his quarrel,
subdued the infidel Soldan, but the latter, to show, as we are told, his
insuperable hatred for Christianity, took handfuls of his own blood,
and cast it in the face of his conqueror—and no doubt here, the
victor had in his mind the true story of Julian insulting “the Galilæan.”
We thus see how history is made to contribute to legend.
And now the appetite of the errant lover grew by what it fed upon. He
mixed himself up in every quarrel, and could not see a lion and a
dragon quietly settling their disputes in a wood, by dint of claws,
without striking in for the lion, slaying his foe, and receiving with
complacency the acknowledgments of the nobler beast.
He achieved something more useful when he met Lord Terry in a
wood, looking for his wife who had been carried off by a score of
ravishers. While the noble lord sat down on a mossy bank, like a
gentleman in a melodrama, Guy rescued his wife in his presence,
and slew all the ravishers, “in funeral order,” the youngest first. He
subsequently stood godfather to his friend Terry’s child, and as I am
fond of historical parallels, I may notice that Sir Walter Scott
performed the same office for a Terry, who if he was not a lord, often
represented them, to say nothing of monarchs and other characters.
Master Guy’s return to England was a little retarded by another
characteristic adventure. As he was passing through Louvain, he
found Duke Otto besieging his father in his own castle—“governor”
of the castle and the Duke. Now nothing shocked Master Guy so
much as filial ingratitude, and despite all that Otto could urge about
niggardly allowance, losses at play, debts of honor, and the
parsimony of the “governor,” our champion made common cause
with the “indignant parent,” and not only mortally wounded Otto, but,
before the latter died, Guy brought him to a “sense of his situation,”
and Otto died in a happy frame of mind, leaving all his debts to his
father. The legacy was by way of a “souvenir,” and certainly the
governor never forgot it. As for Guy, he killed the famous boar of
Louvain, before he departed for England, and as he drew his sword
from the animal’s flank, he remarked, there lies a greater boar, and
not a less beast than Otto himself. However, he took the head and
hams with him, for Phillis was fond of both; and as she was wont to
say, if there was anything that could seduce her, it was brawn!
When Master Guy stepped ashore at Harwich, where that
amphibious town now lies soaking, deputations from all quarters
were awaiting him, to ask his succor against some terrible dragon in
the north that was laying waste all the land, and laying hold of all the
waists which the men there wished to enclose. King Athelstan was
then at York hoping to terrify the indomitable beast by power of an
army, which in combat with the noxious creature made as long a tail,
in retreat, as the dragon itself.
Now whatever this nuisance was which so terribly plagued the good
folks in the North, whether a dragon with a tongue thirty feet long, or
anything else equally hard to imagine, it is matter of fact that our
Master Guy assuredly got the better of it. On his return he met an
ovation in York; Athelstan entertained him at a banquet, covered him
with honor, endowed him with a good round sum, and thus all the
newborn male children in the county became Guys. At least two
thirds of them received the popular name, and for many centuries it
remained in favor, until disgrace was brought upon it by the York
proctor’s son, whose effigy still glides through our streets on each
recurring 5th of November.
I will not pause on this matter. I will only add that the Earl of Warwick,
finding Guy a man whom the King delighted to honor, accepted him
for a son-in-law; and then, ever wise, and civil, and proper, he
discreetly died. The King made Guy Earl of Warwick, in his place,
and our hero being now a married man, he of course ceased to be
Master Guy.
And here I might end my legend, but that it has a moral in it Guy did
a foolish but a common thing, he launched out into extravagant
expenses, and, suddenly, he found himself sick, sad, and insolvent.
Whether, therewith, his wife was soured, creditors troublesome, and
bailiffs presuming, it is hard to say. One thing, however, is certain,
that to save himself from all three, Earl Guy did what nobles often do
now, in the same predicament, “went abroad.” Guy, however,
travelled in primitive style. He went on foot, and made his inn
o’nights in church-yards, where he colloquized with the skulls after
the fashion of Hamlet with the skull of “poor Yorick.” He had given
out that he was going to Jerusalem, but hearing that the Danes were
besieging Athelstan at Winchester, he went thither, and, in modest
disguise, routed them with his own unaided hand. Among his
opponents, he met with the giant Colbron whom he had previously
slain in Orient lands, and the two fought their battles o’er again, and
with such exactly similar results as to remind one of the peculiar
philosophy of Mr. Boatswain Cheeks.
This appearance of Colbron in two places is a fine illustration of the
“myth,” and I mention it expressly for the benefit of the next edition of
the Right Reverend Doctor Whateley’s “Historical Fallacies.” But to
resume.
Guy, imparting a confidential statement of his identity and intentions
to the King, left him, to take up his abode in a cave, in a cliff, near his
residence; and at the gates of his own castle he received, in the
guise of a mendicant, alms of money and bread, from the hands of
his wife. I strongly suspect that the foundation of this section of our
legend rests upon the probable fact that Phillis was of that quality
which is said to belong to gray mares; and that she led Guy a life
which made him a miserable Guy indeed; and that the poor
henpecked man took to bad company abroad, and met with small
allowance of everything but reproach at home And so he “died.”
A dramatic author of Charles I.’s reign, has, however, resuscitated
him in “A Tragical History of Guy, Earl of Warwick,” enacted several
times in presence of that monarch, and professedly written by a
certain “B. J.,” whom I do not at all suspect of being Ben Jonson.
The low comedy portion of this tragic drama is of the filthiest sort,
dealing in phrases and figures which I can hardly conceive would
now be tolerated in the lowest den of St. Giles’s, certainly not out of
it. If Charles heard this given more than once, as the titlepage
intimates, “more shame for him.” If his Queen was present, she
haply may not have understood the verba ad summam caveam
spectantia, and if a daughter could have been at the royal
entertainment, why then the very idea revolts one, and pity is almost
lost in indignation. That the author himself thought well of the piece,
which he printed in 1661, is proved by the defiant epigraph which
says:—

“Carpere vel noli nostra vel ede tua.”

I must not devote much space to a retrospective review of this piece,


particularly as the action begins after Guy has ceased to be “Master,”
and when, on his announcement of going to Jerusalem (perhaps to
the Jews to do a little business in bills), Phillis makes some matronly
remarks in a prospective sense, and a liberty of illustration which
would horrify a monthly nurse.
However, Guy goes forth and meets with a giant so huge, that his
squire Sparrow says it required four-and-twenty men to throw
mustard in his mouth when he dined. From such giants, Heaven
protects the errant Guy, and with a troop of fairies, wafts him to
Jerusalem. Here he finds Shamurath of Babylon assaulting the city,
but Guy heaps miracle on miracle of valor, and produces such
astounding results that Shamurath, who is a spectator of the deeds
and the doer; inquires, with a suspicion of Connaught in the accent
of the inquiry, “What divil or man is this?”
The infidel is more astonished than ever when Guy, after defeating
him, takes him into controversy, and laying hold of him as Dr.
Gumming does of Romanism, so buffets his belief that, the soldier,
fairly out of breath and argument, gives in, and declares himself a
Christian, on conviction.
During one-and-twenty years, Guy has a restless life through the five
acts of this edifying tragedy, and when he is seen again in England,
overcoming the Danes, he intimates to Athelstan that he has six
years more to pass in disguise, ere a vow, of which we have before
heard nothing, will be fulfilled. Athelstan receives all that is said, in
confidence; and promises affably, “upon my word,” not to betray the
secret. Guy is glad to hear that Phillis is “pretty well;” and then he
takes up his residence as I have before told, according to the legend.
He and an Angel occasionally have a little abstruse disquisition; but
the most telling scene is doubtless where the bread is distributed to
the beggars, by Phillis. Guy is here disguised as a palmer, and Phillis
inquires if he knew the great Earl, to which Guy answers, with a wink
of the eye, that he and the Earl had often drank at the same crystal
spring. But Phillis is too dull, or too melancholy to trace her way
through so sorry a joke.
And now, just as the hour of completion of the vowed time of his
disguise, Guy takes to dying, and in that state he is found by
Rainhorn, the son who knows him not. He sends a token by the
young fellow to Phillis, who begins to suspect that the palmer who
used to be so particular in asking for “brown bread” at her gate, must
be the “Master Guy” of the days of sunny youth, short kirtles, and
long love-making. Mother and son haste to the spot, but the vital
spark has fled. Phillis exclaims, with much composed thought, not
unnatural in a woman whose husband has been seven-and-twenty
years away from home, and whose memory is good: “If it be he, he
has a mould-wart underneath his ear” to which the son as
composedly remarks, “View him, good mother, satisfy your mind.”
Thereupon the proper identification of the “party” is established; and
the widow is preparing to administer, without will annexed, when
Rainhorn bids her banish sorrow, as the King is coming. The son
evidently thinks the honor of a living king should drown sorrow for a
deceased parent; just as a Roman family that can boast of a Pope in
it, does not put on mourning even when that Pope dies; the having
had him, being considered a joy that no grief should diminish.
Athelstan is evidently a King of Cockayne, for he affably expresses
surprise at the old traveller’s death, seeing, says his Majesty, that “I
had appointed for to meet Sir Guy” to which the son, who has now
succeeded to the estate, replies, in the spirit of an heir who has been
waiting long for an inheritance:—“that the death has happened, and
can not now be helped.”
But the most remarkable matter in this tragedy is that uttered by
Time, who plays prologue, epilogue, and interlude between the acts.
Whatever Charles may have thought of the piece, he was doubtless
well-pleased with Time, who addresses the audience in verse, giving
a political turn to the lesson on the stage. I dare say the following
lines were loudly applauded, if not by the king, by the gallants,
courtiers, and cavaliers generally:—

“In Holy Land abroad Guy’s spirits roam,


And not in deans and chapters’ lands at home.
His sacred fury menaceth that nation,
Which held Judea under sequestration.
He doth not strike at surplices and tippets,
To bring an olio in of sects and sippets;
But deals his warlike and death-doing blows
Against his Saviour’s and his sov’reign’s foes.”

How the Royalist throats must have roared applause, and


warrantably too, at these genial lines; and how must the churchmen
in the pit have stamped with delight when Time subsequently
assured them that Guy took all his Babylonian prisoners to
Jerusalem, and had them probably christened by episcopally-
ordained ministers! If the house did not ring with the cheers of the
Church-and-King audience there, why they were unworthy of the
instruction filtered through legend and tragedy.
Such is the story of “Master Guy;” a story whose incidents have
doubtless meaning in them, but which were never turned to more
practical purpose than when they were employed to support a
tottering altar and a fallen throne. Reader, let us drink to the immortal
memory of Master Guy; and having seen what sort of man he was
whom the king delighted to honor, let us see what honors were
instituted by kings for other deserving men.
GARTERIANA.
“Honor! Your own worth before
Hath been sufficient preparation.”— The Maid’s Revenge.

A brief sketch of the history of the foundation of the Order of the


Garter will be found in another page. Confining myself here to
anecdotical detail, I will commence by observing, that in former
times, no Knight could be absent from two consecutive feasts of the
order, without being fined in a jewel, which he was to offer at St.
George’s altar. The fine was to be doubled every year, until he had
made atonement. Further, every knight was bound to wear the
Garter in public, wherever he might be, on pain of a mulct of half a
mark. Equally obligatory was it on the knight, in whatever part of the
world he was residing, or however he was engaged, to wear the
sanguine mantle of the order from the eve of St. George till vesper-
time on the morrow of the festival. Some of the chevaliers who were
in distant lands must have caused as much surprise by their
costume, as a Blue-coat boy does, wandering in his strangely-
colored garb, in the streets of Paris. I need not allude to the absurd
consequence which would attend the enforcing of this arrangement
in our own days. Hunting is generally over before the eve of St.
George’s day, and therefore a robed Knight of the Garter could never
be seen taking a double fence, ditch and rail, at the tail of the
“Melton Mowbray.” But even the sight of half a dozen of them riding
down Parliament street at the period in question, would hardly be a
stranger spectacle. A slight money offering of a penny exempted any
rather loose-principled knight from attending divine service at St.
George’s Chapel when he was in or near Windsor. When a knight
died, all his surviving comrades were put to the expense of causing a
certain number of masses to be said for his soul. The sovereign-lord
of the order had one thousand masses chanted in furtherance of his
rescue from purgatory. There was a graduated scale through the
various ranks till the knight-bachelor was come to. For him, only one
hundred masses were put up. This proves either that the knight’s
soul was not so difficult of deliverance from what Prince Gorschakoff
would call the “feu d’enfer,” or that the King’s was so heavily pressed
to the lowest depths of purgatory by its crimes, that it required a
decupled effort before it could be rescued.
“Companionship,” it may be observed, profited a knight in some
degree if, being knave as well as knight, he fell under the usual
sentence of being “drawn, hanged, and beheaded.” In such case, a
Knight of the Garter only suffered decapitation, as Sir Simon Burley
in 1388. The amount of favor shown to the offending knight did not
admit of his being conscious of much gratitude to him at whose
hands it was received. It may be mentioned, that it did not always
follow that a nobleman elected to be knight willingly accepted the
proffered Garter. The first who refused it, after due election, in 1424,
was the Duke of Burgundy. He declined it with as much scorn as
Uhland did the star of merit offered to the poet by the present King of
Bavaria.
In treating of stage knights, I shall be found to have placed at their
head Sir John Falstaff. The original of that character according to
some namely, Sir John Fastolf, claims some notice here, as a Knight
of the Garter who was no more the coward which he was said to be,
than Falstaff is the bloated buffoon which some commentators take
him for. Sir John Fastolf was elected Knight of the Garter in 1426.
Monstrelet says he was removed from the order for running away,
without striking a blow, at the battle of Patay. Shakespeare’s popular
Sir John has nothing in common with this other Sir John, but we
have Falstolf himself in Henry VI. act iv. sc. 1, with Talbot, alluding to
his vow, that

“When I did meet thee next,


To tear the Garter from thy craven’s leg,
The which I have done, because unworthily
Thou wast installed in that high degree.”

This sort of suspension or personal deprivation was never allowed


by the rules of the order, which enjoined the forms for degrading a
knight who was proved to have acted cowardly. The battle of Patay

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