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GENERAL SUMMARY OF EDWARD'S

LECT. I.

Surely, then, this is not a king whose memory Englishmen can allow to fade. Let us sum up his claims to our admiration. Of great natural gifts, accompanied by the most splendid skill in using them, we find abundance. We have the beauty of person, the physical force*, the splendid knighthood, the unconquered generalship of a hero,—the foresight, patience, prudence, and mental activity of a great man, to a degree and in a combination very seldom found in any individual. Of the effect on his age enough has been said. No one questions his zeal for what he believed to be the welfare of his country, nor the largeness of the views he entertained of promoting her greatness and security. On no part of our social, military, ecclesiastical, and *He was "ab humeris et supra" above the common height, aspectu pulcher, magnæ staturæ et elegantis formæ” (Hemingford). Again Trivet tells us, he was "elegantis formæ, staturæ proceræ qua ab humero et supra communi populo præeminebat... frons lata, ceteraque facies pariliter disposita, eo excepto quod sinistri oculi palpebra demissior paterni aspectus similitudinem exprimebat; lingua blæsa, cui tamen efficax facundia." He also speaks of the "nervous vivacity" of his arms, the prominence of his chest, and the length of his legs, so that his seat on horseback was exceedingly firm. Hence his name Longshanks. Hume adds the epithet “smallness” to the length of his legs. I have not been able to find the authority for it. It is apparently a Scotch embellishment. "Of the taking of Berwick Brunne's Langtoft speaks thus:

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"What did then Sir Edward? pere he had none like
Upon his steed bayard first he wan the dyke."

Might not Gibbon have added Edward to his very select list of heroes (only four in all history) who combined in a great degree the personal prowess of the soldier with the qualities of high generalship? Edward might at least rank with Pyrrhus and Henri Quatre, if he could not be placed with Alexander the Great and Belisarius. There are numerous records of his chivalrous feats of daring. Mr. Pearson calls him "brave almost to insanity."

LECT. I.

CLAIMS TO GREATNESS.

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political condition, has he failed to leave his impression. He is fortis, et in seipso totus, teres atque rotundus. Of him more than any other of our monarchs it may be said that all previous English history converges to his reign, and all that is subsequent diverges from it. Even those who find most fault with him sum up his character in words which express as much or more admiration than they bestow on any other of our monarchs. If they cannot agree upon a candidate for the first place, they seem to fix on him for the second, and this once in ancient story settled a question of pre-eminence. Of his private life we have also spoken. Where shall we find his equal in respect of domestic virtues? As to his motives, as far as man can judge, the chroniclers leave no doubt of his reaching the full standard, the high tone which we find now and then in the elevated personages of that age, of his being filled with the very essence of that lofty chivalry which was new-born from the crusading and religious element of late introduced into feudalism. If, as we have seen, there are stages of his career which betoken severity of character and a too great strictness in pursuing what he believed to be right, even though mixed up with innumerable acts of mercy and forgiveness, we may observe the same characteristic in each one of those whom mankind most fully agrees to honour-in a Charlemagne, an Alfred, and a St. Louis. It is the condition of establishing order in a rude age. What is wanted before all things is a "good peace." We are little able to imagine in these days of law and police what a mediæval society really was.

We compare him with those who, since Charlemagne and Alfred, have received or claimed the title of "great." How small do they appear! With our own Alfred alone

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EDWARD THE GOOD.

LECT. I.

we shall find it safe to place him. Like him he was more a restorer and an adapter than an originator; like him he was trained in adversity and nursed in war. His life, like his, was one long devotion to the service of his country. Like him he was not ashamed to make religion, publicly and privately (though not in the same degree), the companion of his daily life; like him he was the first and ablest in doing that which he set his subjects to do. He has not the literary claim to our admiration possessed by Alfred; but, like him, he has left his mark on the country indelibly. He has not, like him, been saluted with the title of "the Great;" but he was called by the writers of the next generation "Edward the Good." It has been to our shame as a nation that we have been so careless of a Royal reputation, and that so little effort has been made to restore him his rights. Perhaps the time is at hand when more enlightened public opinion will repair the

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THE text of one of De Tocqueville's greatest works is this: "A new science of politics is indispensable for a new world;" and the fulfilment of many of his predictions as to the course of events in the United States has gone far to strengthen the sense which has been generally entertained of his political sagacity. But such a sentence jars strangely on the ears of men who have been accustomed to deal with politics as a science of which they learn the rudiments in Plato and Aristotle, Thucydides and Tacitus, and who are accustomed to such interpreters as Thirlwall and Grote, Arnold and Coleridge, Niebuhr and Sir George Cornewall Lewis. There is, no doubt, a sense in which De Tocqueville's words are true, as we shall see further on; but, broadly stated, they are scarcely true. Indeed the converse is more correct. It may be asked whether there is anything in the science of politics which is really new. It may be said that the progress of society may require fresh rules and develop new phenomena, but that these phenomena have at least a remarkable resemblance to others which history has handed down to us, and these rules are little more than adaptations of the principles familiar to the earlier writers on politics.

We must not stop to inquire into the causes of the

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DISTASTE FOR LESSONS OF ANCIENT

LECT. II.

modern distaste for the lessons of ancient history which has succeeded to what was once so fashionable. Perhaps it is not only that the vast accumulations of modern experience, and the necessity for generalizing results, have so completely occupied men's minds; but, possibly, they still remember with disgust the caricature of antiquity which marked the French Revolution, the bombastic harangues, the pedantic imitations, and the absurd nomenclature of that day;* perhaps they have not been led to look with favour on such trains of thought even by the visions of a Democratic Paradise which have been of late unfolded in Mr. Grote's Grecian history, though a candid judgment must admit that his brilliant pages, however one-sided, are a noble

* Coleridge has shown how useful a candid study of ancient history might have been to the men of that day. "If there be any antidote for modern restless craving for wonders and appetite for publicity, . . . . if any means for deriving resignation from general discontent, and building up a stedfast frame of hope . . . . that antidote must be sought for in the collation of the present with the past, in the habit of thoughtfully assimilating the events of our own age to those of the time before us." . "I well remember

that when the examples of former Jacobins, Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, &c., were adduced in France and England at the commencement of the French Consulate, it was rejected as pedantry and pedant's ignorance to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century." . . . . “Even in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers, Marius, Cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the Peasants' War in Germany, were urged on the Convention and its vindicators, the Magi of the day, the true citizens of the world . . . . gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophic an age, so enlightened a nation, to direct the public eye towards them as to lights of warning. Alas! like lights in the stern of a vessel, they illumined the path only that had been passed over."-Lay Sermons.

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