patience, the foresight, the vigilance, the incessant exertion, the utter disregard of toil and danger, by which so many additions to his original inheritance were won and preserved, and by which all his states, old and new, were governed, and the authority of law and order maintained in them, must be sought for in the records of history. Those were the days in which a king of England, to hold his place, really required to be, in all senses, about the ablest man in his dominions; if he was not of such heroic mould, he was almost sure to be thrown down, in that convulsive and stormy condition of things which had not yet subsided since the breaking up of the Roman empire had thrown Europe into a state of social chaos. Nothing, in fact, was fixed and stable; nowhere was the ground firm beneath men's feet; hardly any political arrangement or part of the mechanism of government was brought to such working order as to go on in any degree of itself or as a matter of course; all rights and claims were disputed and in conflict with one another; the boundaries of states, public and private inheritances, the provinces of the civil and ecclesiastical powers, the positions and privileges of the different classes of the community, all remained as yet in many respects unsettled and the subject of fierce contention both by argument and occasionally by force. Of all this confusion the king had to be, as far as possible, the ruler or moderator; and to hold his own besides, often in harness and the battle-field, and when nothing would stand him in much stead if he had not a strong arm and a stout heart. Let us now see how Henry was furnished in body and mind, in capacity and moral disposition, for this post in the front and at the head of the community, according to the testimony of those who knew him best and were the best qualified to understand and describe him.