But Edward was qualified to do far more than merely restore the strength and energy of his fainting people; he was fitted to start and guide them on a new path of progress. He seems to have possessed, with his English name, the desire, which he certainly did not inherit, of being an English king; of putting himself at the head of his English people to make England a great power in Christendom. His aim no doubt was to secure that place for his descendants, not, as Henry II. had done it, simply by founding a great family inheritance of states scattered and divided, but as the true king of a people strong in the feeling of national unity, bound together by good laws, but more so by a sense of national identity, an intelligent participation in all national designs. The restoration of law and order, the determination that the English crown should be supreme within the British isles, the assertion and realization of the idea that the king should work as the leader and spokesman of a nation that could enter into his plans and take a share of his responsibilities--these thoughts must have been more or less before Edward’s mind from the beginning of his reign. Very possibly he foresaw little of the exact path in which he was going to walk: the exact points of legal reform, the opportunities for conquest, the exigencies in which he would have to act for the execution of his great designs, no doubt broke gradually on his view as he proceeded. He had still something to unlearn as well as something to learn. If in spirit he was English, he was in education and by association French; if he was to be a great national king, still his idea of kingship had too much of an inherited form, a form which it did not surrender without a struggle. His greatness was not without an element which sets it far above all the greatness that arises from mere success; he had it to learn, and he learned, to rule himself, to cast away his own cherished idea of reigning, and faithfully and honorably abide by the conditions which, although forced upon him, he saw at last were needed for the true realization of his character as a national king. He was not free from faults; it is no small part of his grandeur that, in a nature so strong as his, and with temptations so powerful as those which were presented to him, those faults had so little sway. Of an eminently legal mind, he was too apt to take captious advantage of his legal position, somewhat prone to evade responsibilities to which the letter of the law did not bind him. This weakness was the source of all his mistakes and the cause of all his failures; but this was all. His mistakes were few, and his failures fewer still. Yet, as we shall see, he did not realize all that he hoped. Nor was his actual contribution to national progress exactly what he designed. There are dark lines in his history as well as bright ones. Of his schemes some were too early, some too late for success; and in some points he drew