of his scheme, however, and, changing her route, got safe to her own town of Poitiers. From this she sent to Henry, then in Normandy, to tell him of her arrival, and of the perils through which she had made her way. He instantly set out to join her, taking with him only a few attendants, and travelling so as to attract as little observation as possible; and they were married on Whitsunday (May the 18th), not quite six weeks after Eleanor's separation from Louis. Henry was not yet twenty years of age, and his bride was full thirty; "but with a good share of beauty," observes Lord Lyttelton, "and more of vivacity, she had still youth enough to gain the heart of a young man, though not to preserve it very long." His lordship nevertheless declines affirming that Henry was really in love,--that his acceptance of Eleanor's offer of her hand was prompted by any other passion than his ambition. There were certainly some strong considerations to be got over, apart altogether from their difference in age. Thus was Henry already lord of nearly the half of France. From the situation of his previous possessions, he was of all the vassals of the French crown the one whom a union with Eleanor was fitted the most to aggrandize. As the duchy of Normandy, which he derived from or through his mother, was conterminous on the south with his three paternal earldoms of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, so his wife's states of Poitou and Guienne lay immediately to the south of these last, the whole forming an unbroken continuation of territory extending from the English Channel to the Pyrenees. To these acquisitions, maternal, paternal, and matrimonial, he soon added another much more splendid than any or all of them, which he may be said to have mainly won for himself by his own right hand. For a brief space he was detained on the continent by having to take arms against a formidable confederacy organized by King Louis, who had now at length opened his eyes, and turned them with amazement and consternation upon his youthful vassal, suddenly become his rival and almost his equal, and had got his own brother the Earl of Dreux, Henry's brother Geoffrey, Eleanor's other disappointed suitor the Earl of Blois, and King Stephen's son Eustace, to join him in an invasion of Normandy. But this attack was repulsed in a campaign of less than six weeks' duration; not only were the invaders driven out of the country to the last man, and an insurrection which they had excited of some of the Anjevin barons effectually crushed, but Henry, pursuing his enemies into France, laid waste a part of that country without Louis daring to turn round and give him battle. This work done, and a peace arranged with the French king, he lost no time in setting about the great enterprise to which all things now seemed to concur in calling him. He landed in England on the 6th of January, 1153, at the head of a force of three thousand foot and a hundred and forty knights. There was some fighting,