been murdered in his dungeon in Berkeley Castle on the 21st of September. The new king, a boy of fourteen when he was thus raised to the throne, was of course at first king only in name, and all power and authority were in the hands of his mother and Mortimer. He was marvellously alert, however, in assuming manhood in various ways. If he was not allowed any share in the government of the country, he was thought already old enough both to rule an army and to rule a wife. Within a few months after his accession, he put himself at the head of a great force, and went forth to fight the Scots; and in the beginning of the next year he was married at York to Philippa, the second daughter of William Count of Hainault, to whom he had been contracted by his mother shortly before their return from the continent. Edward's first campaign, however, must detain us for a little; for the incidents were both remarkable in themselves, and they have been recorded in much detail by the writer to whom we must be principally indebted throughout our sketch. Froissart, indeed, is not so much a great historian as a great historical painter--the greatest that ever painted in words. He is extremely inaccurate in dates and names, and other such prosaic matters, and even in his own proper line he may be suspected of having sometimes intermixed a little fancy with his facts; yet he may be always trusted, better than almost any other writer, for what is after all the most important truth, the characteristic spirit or inner life of what he describes; and even in this part of his chronicle, which relates to events that happened before he was born, and in which therefore he writes to a greater extent than in the latter portions of it from report, he has thrown in much of what he had actually seen along with what he had only heard, and, if the sketching be in so far a copy, the colouring at least is his own. The account of the demonstration (for it was hardly more) which Edward made on the northern border is a great deal too long to be extracted in full; but we will select some of the more striking incidents, or those in which the young English king figures the most conspicuously. As we abridge the narrative, we will retain as much as possible of our author's style and manner, adhering for the most part to the excellent old English translation by Lord Berners.