battlefields of Barnet and Tewkesbury rendered this dangerous element harmless for the future, and Edward, now able to breathe more freely than he had done heretofore, gave himself up without restraint to the impulses of his passions. His life henceforth became one voluptuous revel. The people were more ready to turn with him and his courtiers to pleasure than to criticise and condemn their vices; and so, in peace as in war, Edward’s sail was filled by the favouring breath of popularity. His love for his children and care for their education, his courteousness, his wisdom in weakening the power of the nobility, his encouragement of commerce, and his statesmanship, enlightened for those days, are all good points in Edward’s favour, and should be valued at their proper worth; but the possession of the ordinary virtues, and the performance of the ordinary duties of a prince and a parent, cannot fully redeem and make up for his extraordinary vice, perfidiousness, selfishness, and cruelty; and in the opinion of an age that is not dazzled by his fortune and ability, Edward’s hard, worldly, fleshly nature cannot be deemed worthy of admiration. Richard III. and Henry VII. are but little concerned in the actual conduct of the civil war; not at all in its origin, but chiefly in furthering its effects, or reaping its fruits; but few words therefore need be spent on them here, as it is their policy rather than their personal characters that is of chief interest. The same terribly precocious development of an unscrupulous will and of a heart steeled against mercy, marks the character of Richard III. as that we have seen in Edward IV. The school of civil war in which he had been trained taught him to despise the barriers which could be removed by the shedding of blood, and none ever showed greater aptness in improving on the lessons he had learned. He equalled Louis XI. in dissimulation, in cunning, in statesmanship; he equalled his brother Edward in fearlessness and inflexible purpose; he surpassed him in learning and mental culture. In the estimation of some minds the special pleading of Horace Walpole and others may have succeeded in clearing Richard’s name of the crimes imputed to him, but the majority in this age, as in Richard’s own, who do not demand positive proofs of everything, but judge by the laws of probability, cannot help feeling (rightly or not) a moral certainty of his guilt.