George!' became a word of fear throughout the East; and for a century after his death, the Saracen mother terrified her child, and the Saracen soldier rebuked his horse, with the name of Richard of England. But he left the land which he had only helped to deluge with blood (for his cruelty was not less remarkable than his valour), without the achievement of one enduring advantage; and there was a better than his reason for the grief and shame with which, as he left, he is said to have raised his shield before his eyes when passing within sight of Jerusalem, and to have declared himself unworthy to look upon the holy city which he had not been able to redeem.

What indirect advantages of commerce this as well as subsequent crusades promoted, will better appear hereafter; but it should not be omitted, as a fact very significant of the general progress of the kingdom under his father's reign, that Richard had sailed for the East in a fleet of fifty-three galleys, and a hundred and fifty other ships. So strong a naval armament, manned with seamen so capable of their duties, had probably not before been seen; and some few of the ships carried as many as four hundred persons. It is interesting to couple with this the fact that the laws of Oleron, the origin of modern maritime jurisprudence, and an authority to this day, have their date in Richard's reign. They are even said to have been written by the king; but his troubadour songs, and his rhyming libel on his friend the Duke of Burgundy, are better authenticated. I may add in connection with maritime affairs, that one of the only two legislative charters dated in his reign had a tendency to favour and protect the adventure and enterprise of seamen. It mitigated the severity of the old law of wreeks; by which, in cases of shipwreck, unless the ship could be again set afloat within a given time by her surviving crew, it became, with the cargo, the property of the crown or of the lord of the manor. Richard's charter declared that the owner in no case forfeited his claim; and that if the owner perished, his sons and daughters, and in their default, his brothers and sisters, should have the property in preference to the crown.

Romantic as his Eastern adventures, but not more relevant to sober history, were the king's mishaps on his way back to England. Impatient of his long-delayed arrival, and wholly ignorant of its cause, public expectation could but rise and fall with every serap of party tidings brought by returning pilgrims; till at length an intercepted letter to the French king from the German emperor, revealed the truth that Richard had been taken prisoner on

his passage through Germany. The emperor had bought the royal prisoner from Leopold of Austria for sixty thousand pounds; and had lodged him in chains in one of the castles of the Tyrol; where, by day and by night, naked swords guarded and watched this enemy of the empire and disturber of France.' What followed,-from the hearty sympathy of his English subjects, from the gallant efforts of Longchamp (who had escaped to France and been again in treaty with John) to negotiate his release, from the royal prisoner's gallant self-defence before his judges, from the enormous ransom claimed and the horrible exactions resorted to in raising it-to the flight of John when the French king's famous mission told him to Look to Himself for the Devil was broken Loose, and to the arrival of Richard on the shore of Sandwich amid the acclamations of multitudes assembled there— needs but this cursory mention. Chanceller Geoffrey was dismissed to his archbishopric, and Longchamp was reinstated in his office; a new coronation purged the monarch from the humiliations of his late captivity; John was with a somewhat abused generosity let loose for new treasons; and, after a few brief months' residence in his kingdom, Richard passed over to France to revenge himself on his enemy King Philip.

Yet signs and portents had become rife in England sufficient to have claimed the attention of a more sagacious prince. The country, already drained by frequent exactions, had, by the last contributions to the royal ransom, from which no exception was made in any class, been reduced to poverty from one sea to the other.' Out of this condition, and the neglect of the most ordinary duties of government and police, sprang a quasi-servile war, maintained for some time by the poorer and less substantial against the richer and higher classes; headed by an 'advocate of the people,' William Fitz Osbert; and comprising a secret association of more than fifty-two thousand malcontents. Of this apparently formidable organisation little can now with certainty be traced; but its existence; the formal judicial charge it caused to be brought against Fitz Osbert (he cherished his beard as fanatics commonly do, and is called Longbeard in even the formal records of the time) of circulating preposterous doctrines on the love of liberty and happiness;' its forcible suppression by the violent death of Fitz Osbert, and the seeds of discontent it left, to take other and more dangerous shape in later reigns; are facts which may not be disputed, and which will receive illustration hereafter. There had also arisen out of the long prevalence of factious

struggles between John and the barons during Richard's absence, a new condition, so to speak, of relations between the baronage and the throne, which from any monarch less wilful and unreflecting than Richard, might have claimed some serious attention. The inaptitude and imbecility of John had thrown all the real duties of his government into the hands of a council of barons; these again were opposed by men of their own class, as well for selfinterest as on general and independent grounds; and the result of a series of quarrels thus conducted, between equals as it were in station, between independent forces the crown represented on the one hand, but no longer with the prestige of power it had received from the stronger kings; the aristocracy advancing claims on the other, no longer overborne or overawed by the present pressure of the throne-led to what may be called a system of unscrupulous party struggle, in which royalty lost the exclusive position it had been the great aim of the Conqueror's family to secure to it, and became an unguarded object of attack to whatever hostile confederacy might be formed against it. What elements of good there were in this, to countervail the evil incidents of the reign, will appear after the death of Richard.

Meanwhile, to good and to evil he was alike indifferent. He had not, during the whole of his reign, resided for a year's space in England, and it was ordered that he should never return to He seemed to care for it simply as the source of so much revenue for his private adventures and personal broils. Hubert Archbishop of Canterbury was now, with the aid of Longchamp's counsel, grand justiciary and guardian of the kingdom; and it is stated that he transmitted to Richard during his four years' paltry squabble with Philip, the prodigious sum of eleven hundred thousand pounds. But it must be doubted if such a sum could possibly have been raised at a time when a hyde of land, or a hundred and twenty acres, was commonly let for twenty shillings a year; when an ox or a labouring horse cost but four shillings; when a sow cost a shilling; and when a sheep with fine wool was sold for tenpence, and with coarse wool for sixpence. To the statement of the enormous exactions named it is at the same time added, that though every kind of expedient was neces sarily used to plunder every class, and even the tournaments, revived and allowed by Richard's removal of his father's prohibition, were made the means of avaricious taxation,-less actual violence and injustice were on the whole committed by Hubert,

and more gleams of good and wisdom attended his government, than at any former period of the reign. He was the pupil of the great Glanvil; to the respect he had thus inherited for the laws, is possibly to be attributed the second legislative charter of Richard, establishing the wise provision of an uniformity of weights and measures throughout the kingdom; and it is certain that under his direction and administration, the institution of itinerant justices was not only resumed and continued, but in some respects received improvement. Hoveden enables us to state. that the juries to try pleas for the crown seem now to have consisted regularly of twelve persons. In each county two knights were named by the judges, with power to select two others from each hundred in the county. To the latter two was then intrusted the privilege of adding to their number ten free and lawful men, resident in the neighbourhood; and by these means a jury of twelve was formed in every particular hundred

The details of Richard's war with Philip are in no respect. interesting. It lasted four years; and was distinguished, as in the instance of all Richard's wars and victories, by wonderful feats of valour, and results the most contemptible. Its details. read rather like the chance encounters of ferocious brigands, than the deliberate strife of the two most powerful of Euro-,' pean sovereigns. Its most notable incident was the arrest of an old enemy of Richard, who had exerted himself successfully to prolong his imprisonment and to enforce the most galling of its indignities: the valorous fighting Bishop of Beauvais. He was thrown into a dungeon at Rouen and loaded with irons. Influential churchmen remonstrated. You shall determine for yourselves,' said Richard, whether or not I am justified in what I have done. This man has done me many wrongs. Much I could forget, but not this. When in the hands of the emperor, and when, in consideration of my royal character, they were beginning to treat me more gently and with some marks of respect, your master arrived, and I soon experienced the effect of his visit over-night he spoke with the emperor, and the next morning a chain was put upon me such as a horse could hardly bear. What he now merits at my hands declare yourselves, and be just.' They retired in silence. Appeal was then made to Rouen : but Pope Celestine replied with a severe reproof of the Bishop's martial propensities, and particularly of his having selected a champion of tho Cross to exercise them on. He would solicit only for him

as a friend, he added; as pontiff he could not interfere. He wrote to Richard accordingly, and implored him to pity his dear son, the Bishop of Beauvais.' Richard sent back for answer the blood-smeared coat of mail in which the bishop had been taken prisoner, and to which he had fixed a scroll bearing this happy sentence from the Scriptures: This have we found; know

thou whether it be thy son's coat or no.' The pope answered with a smile that it was not; that it was the coat of a son of Mars; and that Mars must deliver him, if he could. The bishop did not recover his liberty till the king himself bad suffered fell arrest.

Richard's death was characteristic of his life. Soon after a scornful and triumphant letter which he caused to be circulated through England, and in which (alluding to a rout of the French wherein a bridge had sunk beneath the fugitives) he boasted that he had made the king of France drink deep of the waters of the Epte, he engaged in a ridiculous and ignoble quarrel with one of his Poictevin barons, and received his death-wound from an archer on the walls of the castle of Chaluz, whose arrow pierced a joint in his armour. The castle was taken; the garrison, excepting: the archer Gourdon, were butchered; and Gourdon was taken to the couch of the dying king.Wretch what have I done to 'thee,' asked Richard, that thou shouldst seek my life?' . My father and my two brothers,' the young man calmly replied, thou didst slay with thine own hand. So that Thou now diest, and the world is freed from an oppressor, I am content to die.' I forgive thee, youth!' answered Richard, with the last better impulse of his rude and wayward nature. Loose his chains and * give him a hundred shillings.' The order was not heeded in the excitement that followed the king's death, and Gourdon was flayed alive. Richard died in much anguish on Monday the 6th of April, 1199. He left his lion-heart (he was proud of the epithet) to his faithful city of Rouen; his ignoble parts,' his bowels, he bequeathed to his rebellious Poictevins; and he desired his body to be buried in Fontevraud, at his father's feet. He made no mention of England; which seems to have been little in his love or his remembrance, at any time. He was forty-two when he died, and, in his reign of ten years had probably passed six months in the country he was called to govern. He had married Berengaria, the handsome daughter of Sancho, king of Navarre; but he was notoriously unfaithful to her, and he had no issue.