originally, it is well known, favoured and protected by John of Gaunt, and there is reason to believe that his son had shared in these sympathies. But the levelling or democratic tendencies which were thought to be the fruit of Lollardism, and which culminated in Wat Tyler's rising, frightened not only the middle-classes and nobles, but the House of Lancaster into orthodoxy and sympathy with the Church. The nobles and middle-classes had by the commencement of the reign of Henry the Fourth considerably recovered from their panic. They proved, indeed, still doctrinally orthodox enough to pass the statute De Hæretico Comburendo, which ushered in an era of intolerance to the death among fellowChristians in England; but they were not loth to copy a page out of the creed of the Lollards, and to propose to the King a sweeping ecclesiastical reform, which would have reduced the clergy to a condition of primitive Christian poverty, and enriched the King and all other classes, and provided funds for the charity of the kingdom, at their expense. But the House of Lancaster had not moved in this respect with the nation which had called it to the throne. Henry had found the advantage of an alliance with the Church in his struggle with Richard, who had most unwisely alienated its affections by his tyranny, and he therefore entertained an overweening estimate of the strength and importance of the Church. The old superstitious feelings of a Plantagenet (which had peeped forth in his pilgrimage to Jerusalem) may have intensified this feeling, and after his accession he lent himself to the aggrandisement of the Church, without due regard for the interests of the State or the wishes of the people. On this point he was disposed to be obstinate, and to show selfassertion in his dealings with Parliament, and, indeed, there can be little doubt that the Church was saved by his exertions and resistance from a timely reformation, if not from a complete spoliation. On this point Henry was a bigot, and a persecuting bigot, and, as he urged persecution, the Parliament and the people became more tolerant towards the Lollards, and more sympathetic with their teachings. Instead, then, of becoming the leader and moderator of what might have been made a great and wise movement, Henry expended his energies in checking and repressing it, and while he destroyed his own popularity, and undermined the position of his family, ensured the more thorough downfall of the Church in the succeeding century. The mind which was equal to the lessons of casuistry was not wide enough to grasp the bearings of a great and vital question, the faculties which were sufficient to constitute an able administrator, fell short of the dimensions of genius and of the higher statesmanship. - The personal reign of Henry the Fourth may be said, in one sense, to terminate with the latter part of the year 1406. From that time he laboured with yoke-fellows very similar in origin and authority to those which had been imposed on Richard, though the semblance of his personal co-operation was kept up with more outward decency. A painful disease in the face, which had more or less afflicted him from a child of six years old, seems to have rapidly increased, and to have become a sort of leprosy; and now to this was added a succession of epileptic fits, which at last brought him to the grave. Under the influence of these complaints, his mind became seriously weakened, his household expenditure became so reckless, and his general power of administration so obviously broke down, that the Parliament and the Privy Council took decided steps, and after first curbing his extravagance and the misconduct to which his weakness had given rise by rigorous surveillance, at last took the reins of government out of his hands, in all but the name, and placed his eldest son at the head of the Government. Once the King asserted his authority by dismissing his son from the Council, but the act was the last effort on the part of the once all-efficient Bolingbroke, and the Crown which, as the story goes, Prince Henry took prematurely from his father's bedside, had really for several years practically rested on his own head. Henry the Fourth was not a good man or a great man, but he possessed qualities which frequently suggest, though they do not realise, both one and the other character. His aims in life cannot be considered His His either entirely praiseworthy or entirely malign. virtues were nearly as moderate as his vices. intellect, like his morality, had the type of mediocrity; but the mediocrity in the former case was certainly of a higher type than in the latter. His virtue was too passive to endure the ordeal of an active career, but his intellect was strong enough to secure him a creditable place in the gallery of Kings. We may say of him as the old gardener says of Rob Roy in Scott's novel of that name,-"There are mony things ower bad for blessing and ower gude for banning, like,'-Henry of Bolingbroke. 173 HENRY THE FIFTH. THE historical fate of Henry of Monmouth has been a strange one. He has long been the darling of popular fame, first as the actual hero of the battle of Agincourt, and next as the supposed hero of a number of juvenile escapades, which met with a portion of their deserts in the Justice and the lock-up; and it is difficult to say in which capacity he is the more attractive to the popular mind. I always feel some hesitation in arriving at historical conclusions opposed to traditional judgments, but I am afraid that the reputation of Henry, if it is to be supported at all, must rest on other grounds than these:-that the glories of his French campaigns, when looked at with an impartial eye, will appear as little else than the ephemeral, though brilliant, success of a mistaken and disastrous policy, and that the youthful delinquencies which, through the artistic genius of a great dramatist, have exercised such a charm over the fancy, if they have any foundation at all in fact, formed so insignificant a feature in the early life of Henry as to be thoroughly misleading, if taken as an |