too, why it is so, for He is eyes to the blind and ears to the deaf.
[I do not understand this at all. I wonder whether Sir John did as he
wrote it; I am quite sure that his flock did not.]

For Master Richard, then, there was no other person in the world. There
was that that fenced him from all living. Our Saviour Christ upon the
rood spoke to His Blessed Mother before His dereliction, but not again
afterwards. There was no more that He might say to her, or to His
cousin, John.

This, then, was the state in which Master Richard lay--that
_specialissimus_ of God Almighty, to whom the Divine Love and Majesty
was as breath to his nostrils, meat to his mouth, and water to his body.
I an say no more on that point.

As to the fault by which it seemed that he had come to that state, it
was the most terrible of all sins, which is Presumption. Holy Church
sets before us Humility as the chief of virtues, to shew us that
Presumption is the chief of vices. A man may be an adulterer or a
murderer or a sacrilegious person, and yet by Humility may find mercy.
But a man may be chaste and stainless in all his works, and a worshipper
of God, but without Humility he cannot come to glory. [Sir John proceeds
in this strain for several pages, illustrating his point by the cases of
Lucifer, Nabuchodonosor, Judas Iscariot, King Herod, and others.]....

Now the matter in which it seemed to Master Richard that he had sinned
the sin of Presumption was the old matter of the tidings he had borne to
the King. It was not that the tidings were false, for he knew them for
true; but yet that he had been presumptuous in bearing them. It was as
though a stander-by had overheard tidings given by a king to his