cost the heir to a throne when he heard how she had died,--or how he
raged and swore and wept. It was the first Wrong forced on him as
Right, by the laws of the realm; and he was young and generous and
honest, and not hardened to those laws then. Their iniquity and
godlessness appeared to him in plain ugly colours undisguised. Since
that time he had perforce fallen into the habit and routine of his
predecessors, though he was not altogether so 'constitutional' a
sovereign as his father had been. He had something of the spirit of one
who had occupied his throne five hundred years before him; when
strength and valour and wit and boldness, gave more kings to the world
than came by heritage. He did unconventional things now and then; to
the grief of flunkeys, and the alarm of Court parasites. But his
kingdom was of the South, where hot blood is recognized and excused,
and fiery temper more admired than censured, and where,--so far as
social matters went,--his word, whether kind, cold, or capricious, was
sufficient to lead in any direction that large flock of the silly sheep
of fashion who only exist to eat, and to be eaten. Sometimes he longed
to throw himself back into bygone centuries and stand as his earliest
ancestor stood, sword in hand, on a height overlooking the battle-
field, watching the swaying rush of combat,--the glitter of spears and
axes--the sharp flight of arrows--the tossing banners, the grinding
chariots, the flying dust and carnage of men! There was something to
fight for in those days,--there was no careful binding up of wounds,--
no provision for the sick or the mutilated,--nothing, nothing, but
'Victory or Death!' How much grander, how much finer the old fierce
ways of war than now, when any soldier wounded, may write the details
of his bayonet-scratch or bullet-hole to the cheap press, and the
surgeon prys about with Rontgen-ray paraphernalia and scalpel, to
discover how much or how little escape from dissolution a man's soul
has had in the shock of contest with his foe! Of a truth these are