the great elements of the old feudal order; a new Nobility was called
into power, to aid the growing Middle Class in its struggles with the
ancient; and in the fate of the hero of the age, Richard Nevile, Earl
of Warwick, popularly called the King-maker, "the greatest as well as
the last of those mighty Barons who formerly overawed the Crown,"
[Hume adds, "and rendered the people incapable of civil government,"--
a sentence which, perhaps, judges too hastily the whole question at
issue in our earlier history, between the jealousy of the barons and
the authority of the king.] was involved the very principle of our
existing civilization. It adds to the wide scope of Fiction, which
ever loves to explore the twilight, that, as Hume has truly observed,
"No part of English history since the Conquest is so obscure, so
uncertain, so little authentic or consistent, as that of the Wars
between the two Roses." It adds also to the importance of that
conjectural research in which Fiction may be made so interesting and
so useful, that "this profound darkness falls upon us just on the eve
of the restoration of letters;" [Hume] while amidst the gloom, we
perceive the movement of those great and heroic passions in which
Fiction finds delineations everlastingly new, and are brought in
contact with characters sufficiently familiar for interest,
sufficiently remote for adaptation to romance, and above all, so
frequently obscured by contradictory evidence, that we lend ourselves
willingly to any one who seeks to help our judgment of the individual
by tests taken from the general knowledge of mankind.

Round the great image of the "Last of the Barons" group Edward the
Fourth, at once frank and false; the brilliant but ominous boyhood of
Richard the Third; the accomplished Hastings, "a good knight and
gentle, but somewhat dissolute of living;" [Chronicle of Edward V., in
Stowe] the vehement and fiery Margaret of Anjou; the meek image of her