uity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's
Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution; but a green solid place,
that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it: the
vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn;
ditches were dug, furrow-fields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day
all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home
weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived
nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and
Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil,--between hope,
hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell. Not vapour
Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all! Coeur-de-Lion was not a
theatrical popinjay with greaves and steel-cap on it, but a man living
upon victuals,--_not_ imported by Peel's Tariff. Coeur-de-Lion came
palpably athwart this Jocelin at St. Edmundsbury; and had almost
peeled the sacred gold '_Feretrum_,' or St. Edmund Shrine itself, to
ransom him out of the Danube Jail.

These clear eyes of neighbour Jocelin looked on the bodily presence of
King John; the very John _Sansterre_, or Lackland, who signed _Magna
Charta_ afterwards in Runnymead. Lackland, with a great retinue,
boarded once, for the matter of a fortnight, in St. Edmundsbury
Convent; daily in the very eyesight, palpable to the very fingers of
our Jocelin: O Jocelin, what did he say, what did he do; how looked
he, lived he;--at the very lowest, what coat or breeches had he on?
Jocelin is obstinately silent. Jocelin marks down what interests
_him_; entirely deaf to _us_. With Jocelin's eyes we discern almost
nothing of John Lackland. As through a glass darkly, we with our own
eyes and appliances, intensely looking, discern at most: A blustering,
dissipated human figure, with a kind of blackguard quality air, in
cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain texture, uncertain cut, with much
plumage and fringing; amid numerous other human figures of the like;
riding abroad with hawks; talking noisy nonsense;--tearing out the
bowels of St. Edmundsbury Convent (its larders namely and cellars) in
the most ruinous way, by living at rack and manger there. Jocelin
notes only, with a slight subacidity of manner, that the King's
Majesty, _Dominus Rex_, did leave, as gift for our St. Edmund Shrine,
a handsome enough silk cloak,--or rather pretended to leave, for one
of his retinue borrowed it of us, and _we_ never got