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at the mercy of circumstances.

A mutiny in

his army, a panic fear, an epidemic disease, and he is handed over to his foe.

Had Richard possessed less of the warrior and more of the law-restrained politician within his breast, he would not have met his untimely death; a king can no more be justified than a subject when, armed only with the right of monarchical power, he besieges the castle of a subject, to deprive him of an inheritance which chance has thrown in his way. Richard's death, generally so lightly passed over, is, in fact, a great and searching lesson.

Let us now pass over two reigns; which brings us to that of Philip the Third of France, contemporary with Edward the First of England. His reign was scandalously corrupt; the features of the cruelty of that period will never be effaced from history. The

Sicilian Vespers, the Albigense crusade, the

Flemish war, and the barbarous treatment of the Knights Templars, are marks for the historian, the poet, and the philosopher. And the latter may vainly vaunt man's courage, let him rather mourn over his sanguinary strength, the force of arms was needed for all these cruel purposes; but Philip the Third will answer at a stronger tribunal for the victims. of his sateless revenge. His contemporary meanwhile earned for himself the title of " the English Justinian." His useful laws will be amidst England's codes when Philip, surnamed the Hardy, will be considered hardy only on one point—cruelty.

Philip the Sixth, the first of the race of Valois, presents a memorable lesson in the history of his misfortunes; and remote as the period may be, we could, were it not too personal, compare the way in which he was

* Vide the "Cinque Ports."

treated as a prisoner in England, with the modern treatment of a certain splendid, but too ambitious, warrior. That law of conscience which is comprehended in the word "honour," made Edward trust his prisoner, and when the unfortunate Dauphin, returning to his native country, found himself deficient of the required ransom, he returned broken-hearted, but with unstained honour to his English exile.

The mind of the Dauphin soared far beyond the century, and the binding honour of a promise was felt at the expense of liberty and life: this inherent rule of honorable conduct being too often slighted, law has arisen to bind, to sanctify, to render impassable the contract which is made between nation and nation, man, and man; but in some high and well-regulated minds, simple honour is as powerful as

law; the latter so often misconstrued is, in fact,

honour under worldly instead of mental

regulations.

We have a powerful argument before us, in the struggle between the friends of Henry the Sixth of England, in their endeavours to establish him on the French throne, and the heroic devotion of the Maid of Orleans, endeavouring to restore Charles the Sixth's Dauphin to the right of his forefathers. We are not disposed to enter upon a critical essay, to prove whether the heroine was justified in indulging her superstitious calling, but our aim is to consider how simple an instrument may affect a great nation when justice is on the feeble side, might of arms on the wrong.

Beautiful enthusiast! ill-requited were thy services; thy noble head bowed to the destroyer's power, but thy heart bravely encountered all for the sake of that which thy enthusiastic soul taught thee to call right. With the

king's faults Joan had no part; the fate of birth had made him the son of a king; the faults of our ancestors ought not to be heaped upon our shoulders; to Charles the Oppressed belonged the right of the French throne, and Joan never rested until the oppressed became the victorious. The reader may probably weary of these ramblings amongst ages gone by, we will therefore launch at once into the Medici

era.

Stop! cries the critic, the Medici was political. Aye, but the justice of policy was not hers; the cunning, the avarice, the murder, the treachery to which policy may be perverted, belonged to this black-hearted woman; but its beneficence, its religion, its humanizing influence upon mankind were totally wanting; and of all her sons, all her abettors, all her admirers, not one proved more humane than she, whose plots and horrid deeds have de

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