veres only the Earthly, Gold-coined; and has a
most morbid lamentable flaw in the texture of him. It cannot come to
good.

Accordingly, the same flaw, or St.-Vitus' _tic_, manifests itself ere
long in another way. In the year 1157, he went with his Standard to
attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom _we_ saw afterwards at
Waltham), in his War with the Welsh. A somewhat disastrous War; in
which while King Henry and his force were struggling to retreat
Parthian-like, endless clouds of exasperated Welshmen hemming them in,
and now we had come to the 'difficult pass of Coleshill,' and as it
were to the nick of destruction,--Henry Earl of Essex shrieks out on a
sudden (blinded doubtless by his inner flaw, or 'evil genius' as some
name it), That King Henry is killed, That all is lost,--and flings
down his Standard to shift for itself there! And, certainly enough,
all _had_ been lost, had all men been as he;--had not brave men,
without such miserable jerking _tic-douloureux_ in the souls of them,
come dashing up, with blazing swords and looks, and asserted, That
nothing was lost yet, that all must be regained yet. In this manner
King Henry and his force got safely retreated, Parthian-like, from the
pass of Coleshill and the Welsh War.[19] But, once home again, Earl
Robert de Montfort, a kinsman of this Standard-bearer's, rises up in
the King's Assembly to declare openly that such a man is unfit for
bearing English Standards, being in fact either a special traitor, or
something almost worse, a coward namely, or universal traitor. Wager
of Battle in consequence; solemn Duel, by the King's appointment, 'in
a certain Island of the Thames-stream at Reading, _apud Radingas_,
short way from the Abbey there.' King, Peers, and an immense multitude
of people, on such scaffoldings and heights as they can come at, are
gathered round, to see what issue the business will take. The business
takes this bad issue, in our Monk's own words faithfully rendered:

'And it came to pass, while Robert de Montfort thundered on him
manfully (_viriliter intonasset_) with hard and frequent strokes, and
a valiant beginning promised the fruit of victory, Henry of Essex,
rather giving way, glanced round on all sides; and lo, at the rim of
the horizon, on the confines of the River and land, he discerned the
glorious King and Martyr Edmund, in shining armour, and as if hovering
in the air; looking towards him with severe countenance, nodding his
head