thus address your most tried confidant and your lealest friend, your
most dangerous enemy is yourself."

"Stay, man," said the king, softening. "I was over warm, but the wild
beast within me is chafed. Would Gloucester were here!"

"I can tell you what would be the counsels of that wise young prince,
for I know his mind," answered Hastings.

"Ay, he and you love each other well. Speak out."

"Prince Richard is a great reader of Italian lere. He saith that
those small States are treasuries of all experience. From that lere
Prince Richard would say to you, 'Where a subject is so great as to be
feared, and too much beloved to be destroyed, the king must remember
how Tarpeia was crushed."

"I remember naught of Tarpeia, and I detest parables."

"Tarpeia, sire (it is a story of old Rome), was crushed under the
weight of presents. Oh, my liege," continued Hastings, warming with
that interest which an able man feels in his own superior art, "were I
king for a year, by the end of it Warwick should be the most unpopular
(and therefore the weakest) lord in England!"

"And how, O wise in thine own conceit?"

"Beau sire," resumed Hastings, not heeding the rebuke--and strangely
enough he proceeded to point out, as the means of destroying the
earl's influence, the very method that the archbishop had detailed to