“In which season the blind king, having in the chief city of his realm set the crown upon his son Leonatus’s head, with many tears both of joy and sorrow, setting forth to the whole people his own faults, and his son’s virtue; after he had kissed him, and forced his son to accept honour of him, as of his new-become subject, even in a moment died, as it should seem, his heart broken with unkindness and affliction, stretched so far beyond his limits with this access of comfort that it was able no longer to keep safe his vital spirits. But the new king, having no less lovingly performed all duties to him dead, than alive, pursued on the siege of his unnatural brother, as much for the revenge of his father as the establishing of his own quiet. In which siege truly I cannot but acknowledge the prowess of those two brothers, than whom the princes never found in all their travel, two of greater ability to perform, nor of abler skill for conduct. “But Plexirtus finding that if nothing else, famine would at last bring him to destruction, thought better by humbleness to creep, where by pride he could not march. For certainly so had Nature formed him, and the exercise of craft conformed him to all turningness of flights, that, though no man had less goodness in his soul than he, no man could better find the places whence arguments might grow of goodness to another; though no man felt less pity, no man could tell better how to stir pity; no man more impudent to deny, where proofs were not manifest; no man more ready to confess with a repenting manner of aggravating his own evil, where denial would but make the fault fouler. Now he took this way, that having gotten a passport for one, that pretended he {176} would put Plexirtus alive into his hands, to speak with the king his brother, he himself (though much against the minds of the valiant brothers, who rather wished to die in brave defence) with a rope about his neck, bare-footed, came to offer himself to the discretion of Leonatus. Where what submission he used, how cunningly in making greater the fault, he made the faultiness the less, how artificially he could set out the torments of his own conscience, with the burdensome cumber he had found of his ambitious desires, how finely seeming to desire nothing but death, as ashamed to live, he begged life in the refusing it, I am not cunning enough to be able to express; but so fell out of it, that though at first sight Leonatus saw him with no other eye than as the murderer of his father, and anger already began to paint revenge in many colours, ere long he had not only gotten pity but pardon; and if not an excuse of the fault past, yet an opinion of a future amendment: while the poor villains (chief ministers of his wickedness, now betrayed by the author thereof) were delivered to many cruel sorts of death; he so handling it, that it rather seemed he had more come into the defence of an