had planned, and he outlived the greater princes whose power and character and career had thrown his own into the shade. Yet England did nothing great in his time except as against him. He had no great design, no energetic purpose. He was not strong enough to be true, although he was strong enough to be pertinacious, resolute enough to be false. He was vain and extravagant; and this, with the exception of his falseness, is the worst that can be said of him. Hence, whilst he could not inspire love or loyalty, he could inspire hatred, and hatred is not, in the case of kings, as is so often said of the feeling in the case of lower men, incompatible with contempt: a king may inspire both feelings, and be despised for moral weakness and iniquity, whilst he cannot safely be contemned altogether, because of his great power to cause mischief. Then, vanity and extravagance, which are minor faults in a man with strong purposes, become aggravations and incentives to hatred in a man whose other motives and purposes are weak. Henry III. was well hated. His life, good or evil, had no gloss or glitter upon it; it was mean in the midst of its magnificence; it was wanting in the one element that leads men to respect, even where they fear and blame, the character of reality or “veracity to a man’s self.” There was no purpose, as there was no faith in it. [Sidenote: Division of the reign. ] Fifty-six years of such a king cannot but be a wearisome lesson to the reader, if the eye rest on the king only or on the circle of events of which he is the centre; and to a certain degree, in these ages in which we have to depend chiefly on the historians of the time, with little help from other sorts of literature, the king is necessarily the centre of every circle. The monotony of detail may, however, be broken by arranging the reign in four divisions. Henry was nine years old when he began to reign. The first portion, then, comprises the years of his minority, and may be regarded as closing about the year 1227, although, as the influence of his early ministers continued to affect him for some years longer, that date is not a very distinct limit. The second division comprises the years of his personal administration, during which he mismanaged matters for himself, and which end at the year 1258, when, having brought affairs to a dead lock, he was obliged to consent to be superseded by a new scheme of government embodied in the Provisions of Oxford. The third period includes the years of eclipse, from 1258 to 1265, when the battle of Evesham gave him again the power as well as the name of king. The last period contains the seven years intervening between the battle of Evesham and the king’s death, and depends for its historic interest entirely on the fact that it witnessed the results of the great struggle--the clearing of the board after the crisis of the game was past. [Sidenote: Accession of Henry III. ] [Sidenote: Henry’s party. ]