Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians
History
Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians
Biography
forty-seven drachms of silver and one piece of gold coin were found in
the treasury; yet in a martial reign, the tributes were diminished, and
the wealthy citizens enjoyed without fear or danger the fruits of their
industry. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, were adorned by the royal
foundations of hospitals, colleges, and mosques, and Cairo was fortified
with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use,
nor did the sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private
luxury. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of
Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians: the Emperor of Germany
gloried in his friendship, the Greek emperor solicited his alliance, and
the conquest of Jerusalem diffused, and perhaps magnified, his fame both
in the East and West.
HENRY II, KING OF ENGLAND.
BY DAVID HUME.
[Born 1113, died 1189. Henry was the grandson of Henry I, the
great-grandson of William the Conqueror by the distaff side, and
son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou. He was first of the
Plantagenet dynasty of English kings. His reign was brilliantly
distinguished by the further establishment of legal institutions
and a rigid regard for justice to all classes of his subjects.]
Thus died, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, and thirty-fifth of his
reign, the greatest prince of his time, for wisdom, virtue, and
abilities, and the most powerful in extent of dominion of all those that
had ever filled the throne of England. His character, in private as well
as in public life, is almost without a blemish, and he seems to have
possessed every accomplishment, both of body and mind, which makes a
man either estimable or amiable. He was of a middle stature, strong and
well proportioned; his countenance was lively and engaging; his
conversation affable and entertaining; his elocution easy, persuasive,
and ever at command. He loved peace, but possessed both bravery and
conduct in war, was provident without timidity, severe in the execution
of justice without rigor, and temperate without austerity. He preserved
health, and kept himself from corpulency, to which he was somewhat
inclined, by an abstemious diet and by frequent exercise, particularly
hunting. When he could enjoy leisure, he recreated himself either in
learned conversation or in reading, and he cultivated his natural
talents by study above any prince of his time. His affections, as well
as his enmities, were warm and durable, and his long experience of the
ingratitude and infidelity of men never destroyed the natural
sensibility of his temper, which disposed him to friendship and society.
His character has been transmitted to us by several writers who were his
contemporaries, and it extremely resembles, in its most remarkable
features, that of his maternal grandfather, Henry I, excepting only that
ambition, which was a ruling passion in both, found not in the first
Henry such unexceptionable means of exerting itself, and pushed that
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