But truly it is a strange consideration this simple one, as we go on with him, or indeed with any lucid simple-hearted soul like him: Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell. Not vapour Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all! Coeur-de- Lion was not a theatrical popinjay with greaves and steelcap on it, but a man living upon victuals,--_not_ imported by Peel's Tariff. Coeur-de-Lion came palpably athwart this Jocelin at St. Edmundsbury; and had almost peeled the sacred gold _'Feretrum,'_ or St. Edmund Shrine itself, to ransom him out of the Danube Jail. These clear eyes of neighbour Jocelin looked on the bodily presence of King John; the very John _Sansterre,_ or Lackland, who signed _Magna Charta_ afterwards in Runnymead. Lackland, with a great retinue, boarded once, for the matter of a fortnight, in St. Edmundsbury Convent; daily in the very eyesight, palpable to the very fingers of our Jocelin: O Jocelin, what did he say, what did he do; how looked he, lived he;--at the very lowest, what coat or breeches had he on? Jocelin is obstinately silent. Jocelin marks down what interests _him;_ entirely deaf to _us._ With Jocelin's eyes we discern almost nothing of John Lackland. As through a glass darkly, we with our own eyes and appliances, intensely looking, discern at most: A blustering, dissipated, human figure, with a kind of blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing; amid numerous other human figures of the like; riding abroad with hawks; talking noisy nonsense;--tearing out the bowels of St. Edmundsbury Convent (its larders namely and cellars) in the most ruinous way, by living at rack and manger there. Jocelin notes only, with a slight subacidity of manner, that the King's Majesty, _Dominus Rex,_ did leave, as gift for our St. Edmund Shrine, a handsome enough silk cloak,--or rather pretended to leave, for one of his retinue borrowed it of us, and we never got sight of it again; and, on the whole, that the _Dominus Rex,_ at departing, gave us 'thirteen _sterlingii,'_ one shilling and one penny, to say a mass for him; and so departed,--like a shabby Lackland as he was! 'Thirteen pence sterling,' this was what the