'King Henry was a great prince, who did evil to many both in his life and death. My dear master, lord, and friend might have been a greater, had not his head gone counter to his heart, his generosity not been tripped up by his pride. So generous as he was, all the world might have loved him, as one loved him; and yet so arrogant of mind that the very largess he bestowed had a sting beneath it, as though he scorned to give less to creatures that lacked so much. All his faults and most of his griefs sprang from this rending apart of his nature. His heart cried Yea! to a noble motion. Then came his haughty head to suggest trickery, and bid him say Nay! to the heart's urgency. 'He was a religious man, a pious man, the hottest fighter with the coolest judgment of any I have ever known; a great lover of one woman. He might have been a happy man if she had been let have her way. But he thwarted her, he played with her whole-heart love, blew hot and cold; neither let her alone nor clove to her through all. So she had to pay. And of him, my friend and king howsoever, I say from the bottom of my soul, if his death did not benefit poor Jehane, then it is a happy thing for a woman to go bleeding in the side. But I know that she was fortunate in his death, and believe that he was also. For he had space for reparation, died with his lovers about him, having been saved in time from a great disgrace. And it is a very wise man who reports: _Illi Mors gravis incubat, qui notus nimis omnibus, ignotus moritur sibi_. But King Richard knew himself in those last keen hours, and (as we believe) won forgiveness of God. 'God be good to him where he is! They say that when he died, that same day his soul was solved from purgatorial fires (by reason, one may suppose, of his glorious captaincy of the armies of the Cross), and he drawn up to heaven in a flamy cloud. I know nothing certainly of this, which was not revealed to me; but my prayer is that he may be now with Hannibal and Judas Maccabæus and Charles the great Emperor; and by this time of writing (if there be no offence in it) with Jehane to sit upon his knee. 'UPON WHOSE TWO SOULS, JESU, HAVE MERCY!' EXPLICIT End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, by Maurice Hewlett