ure with which his much
meaner successor placarded the world when he was dead. He was not even a
hunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probably
the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and
sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as the
crooked shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogre
shedding rivers of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it as
much as any men of that wicked time; and even the tale of his murdered
nephews is not certain, and is told by those who also tell us he was
born with tusks and was originally covered with hair. Yet a crimson
cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so tainted is the very
air of that time with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable even
of the things of which he may have been innocent. Whether or no he was a
good man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular one; yet we
think of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. He
anticipated the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music,
and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity. He
did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only
pleasure was in cutting throats; he probably did it because he was
nervous. It was the age of our first portrait-painting, and a fine
contemporary portrait of him throws a more plausible light on this
particular detail. For it shows him touching, and probably twisting, a
ring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung personality who would
also fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there painted, we can
study all that has made it worth while to pause so long upon his name;
an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The face
has a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on the
face that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing is
death; the death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, the
death of something which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St.
Francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the First
Crusade, but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards,
wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for the
crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and has this one grace
among its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to die.

But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Glouce