a vermilion tint, his limbs well formed, and the bones and sinews of his frame firmly knit together. His schoolmaster had been his uncle, the celebrated Cardinal Beaufort, one of the most astute men of the age, and we have evidence that he imbibed a taste for learning and literature, and a pleasure in the society of literary and learned men. While Prince of Wales, he requested the poet Lydgate to translate the Destruction of Troy,' because he wished the story to be known generally to high and low. Lydgate tells us that the Prince, to avoid the vice of sloth and idleness, employed himself in exercising his body in martial plays, according to the instructions of Vegetius. As Prince, also, he became a patron of the poet Oceleve, who addresses to him two of his poems. His great love of music and his proficiency in archery complete the record of his special tastes and accomplishments. The chaplain already quoted attributes to him a quiet and dignified sense of humour and a versatility of mood, which rather lend countenance to a modified reception of the stories of Prince Hal. His temper seems to have been generally bright and cheerful, but to have been subject to occasional fits of moodiness, the soldier and man of the world, perhaps, alternating in his mind with the brooding religious devotee.

Such was Henry of Monmouth, the third hero-king of the English people, and the noblest representative

of the House of Lancaster,-a Bayard, a Statesman, and a Fanatic,-the Roman Catholic Coligny, we might almost call him, of the fifteenth century,—yet above all, in everything that he said or did, a King and an Englishman.

191

HENRY THE SIXTH.

THE transition in one generation from one of the most energetic and successful of our Kings to one of the feeblest and most unfortunate-from one of the most self-reliant to one of the most dependent, and from a Hero-King to a Crowned Monk, is a fact worthy of some attention in any study of the descent and degeneration of character. Unlike as Henry of Monmouth and his son, Henry of Windsor, appear to be in their developed characters, and although the dissimilarity became such as to constitute almost a generic difference, there were some features in the character of both which exhibit a family likeness, and a difference of degree rather than of kind. Henry of Windsor was, indeed, an example of the effect of constitutional disease on family characteristics. There can be little doubt that he inherited from his grandfathers on both sides a diseased constitution. Henry the Fourth, as we have seen, was a sufferer from leprosy and epilepsy; Henry the Fifth is said by some writers not to have been entirely exempt from the former complaint; while Charles the Sixth

of France was for a considerable part of his life a decided maniac. It was from these debilitating sources that the constitution of the successor to the hero of Agincourt was derived; and it was under conditions and modifications imposed by these, that whatever there was in his qualities in common with his father was necessarily developed. There might be irritability and occasional violence with a character thus derived-there could scarcely have been strength or vigour. But, in fact, Henry the Sixth was not violent at any time, and his mind, when it became affected, tottered on the brink of idiotey, and not of madness. It was rather a general weakening and stagnation of the bodily and mental frame than a derangement of either. In the fits of illness to which he became subject he lost both sense and memory, and the use of his limbs.

When

addressed by a deputation of the Peers he neither spoke nor moved, nor showed the smallest sign of intelligence. The deputation, in the zealous discharge of their duty, shook the unfortunate man, but they excited neither voice nor attention. They had him moved from one room to another, they pulled him about, but nothing could rouse him from his absolute lethargy. He could breathe and eat, but that was all. Such was the form which his disease assumed during its greatest though very transient intensity, and this was the general tendency of his constitution. At other times, and in the

common

usual course of his life, he was rational enough in the ordinary sense of the term, capable of considerable intellectual exertion in certain directions, and of a fair amount of intellectual apprehension. He inherited his father's love of books and learning and the learned, but the two men must have been students in a very different spirit. Henry of Monmouth read and listened on such subjects with the keen and active mind of a statesman and, perhaps, a casuist; his son read in a passive manner, as a recluse might read, and imbibed knowledge with the spirit of a pedagogue and a pious moralist. The tendency to direct others was really a element in both father and son, but in the fifth Henry it displayed itself in administrative capacity -in the sixth Henry in moral admonitions and a mild moral supervision. But their practical success was very unequal in the two. The elder Henry, as we have seen, gained at an early age the confidence of all England, as he did, at a later period, of France, by his judicious government; for with considerable frankness of manner at least, and, on the whole, a fair average amount of actual sincerity and veracity, joined to a strong sense of duty, he was an experienced man of the world. The younger Henry, as a monk who knew him well tells us, was 6 a man of pure simplicity of mind, without the least deceit or falsehood; he did nothing by trick, he always spoke truth, and performed every promise he made; he