all their popular ethics in legend, chronicle, and
ballad. It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavy
intellectual forces. The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and the
physical science of the nineteenth, whatever other truths they may have
taught, have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom. We think of
bad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind of
people. The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism. It
brought the villain upon the stage; the lost soul; the modern version
of King John. But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like that
about him, even when they detested him. They instinctively felt him to
be a man of mixed passions like themselves, who was allowing his evil
passions to have much too good a time of it. They might have spoken of
him as a man in considerable danger of going to hell; but they would
have not talked of him as if he had come from there. In the ballads of
Percy or Robin Hood it frequently happens that the King comes upon the
scene, and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale. But we
do not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there is
a definite stage direction "Enter Tyrant." Nor do we behold a deus ex
machina who is certain to do all that is mild and just. The King in the
ballad is in a state of virile indecision. Sometimes he will pass from
a towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness;
sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be turned from it by
a jest. Yet this august levity is not moral indifference; it is moral
freedom. It is the strong sense in the writer that the King, being
the type of man with power, will probably sometimes use it badly and
sometimes well. In this sense John is certainly misrepresented, for he
is pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw. In
that sense he was certainly not so black as he is painted, for he lived
in a world where every one was piebald.

King John would be represented in a modern play or novel as a kind
of degenerate; a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's
backbone and green blood in his veins. The mediaevals were quite capable
of boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapable
of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking a fortiori
case is that of the strange mediaeval legend of Robert the Devil.
Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to