specimens of the chiefs of their line, almost all of whom were very
able men, having even a touch of genius in them, but therewithal were
such wanton blackguards and scoundrels that one is almost forced to
apply the theological word "wickedness" to them. Such characters
belong specially to their times, fertile as they were both of great
qualities and of scoundrelism, and in which our own special vice of
hypocrisy was entirely lacking. John, the second of these two pests,
put the coping-stone on the villany of his family, and lost his
French dominion in the lump.

Under such rascals as these came the turn of the Baronage; and they,
led by Stephen Langton, the archbishop who had been thrust on the
unwilling king by the Pope, united together and forced from him his
assent to Magna Charta, the great, thoroughly well-considered deed,
which is conventionally called the foundation of English Liberty, but
which can only claim to be so on the ground that it was the
confirmation and seal of the complete feudal system in England, and
put the relations between the vassals, the great feudatories, and the
king on a stable basis; since it created, or at least confirmed,
order among these privileged classes, among whom, indeed, it
recognized the towns to a certain extent as part of the great feudal
hierarchy: so that even by this time they had begun to acquire
status in that hierarchy.

So John passed away, and became not long after an almost mythical
personage, the type of the bad king. There are still ballads, and
prose stories deduced from these ballads, in existence, which tell
the tale of this strange monster as the English people imagined it.

As they belong to the literature of the fourteenth century, the