ty and pleasure makes us heartless, selfish, and unfeeling,
while sorrow softens the heart, and disposes us to compassionate the
woes of others, and to do what we can to relieve them.

Eleanora was queen regent in England for two months, and during that
time she employed her power in a very beneficent manner. She released
many unhappy prisoners, and pardoned many persons who had been
convicted of political crimes. The truth is that probably, as she
found herself drawing toward the close of life, and looked back upon
her past career, and remembered her many crimes, her unfaithfulness to
both her husbands, and especially her unnatural conduct in instigating
her sons to rebel against their father, her heart was filled with
remorse, and she found some relief from her anguish in these tardy
efforts to relieve suffering which might, in some small degree, repair
the evils that she had brought upon the land by the insurrections and
wars of which she had been the cause. She bitterly repented of the
hostility that she had shown toward her husband, and of the countless
wrongs that she had inflicted upon him. While he was alive, and she
was engaged in her contests with him, the excitement that she was
under blinded her mind; but now that he was dead, her passion
subsided, and she mourned for him with bitter grief. She distributed
alms in a very abundant manner to the poor to induce them to pray for
the repose of his soul. While doing these things she did not neglect
the affairs of state. She made all the necessary arrangements for the
immediate administration of the government, and she sent word to all
the barons, and also to the bishops, and other great public
functionaries, informing them that Richard was coming to assume the
government of the realm, and summoning them to assemble and make ready
to receive him. In about two months Richard came.

Before Richard arrived in England, however, he had formed the plan,
in connection with Philip, the King of France, of going on a crusade.
Richard was a wild and desperate man, and he loved fighting for its
own sake; and inasmuch as now, since his father was dead, and his
claim to the crown of England, and to all his possessions in Normandy,
was undisputed, there seemed to be nobody for him to fight at home, he
conceived the design of organizing a grand expedition to go to the
Holy Land and fight the Saracens.

John was very much pleased with this idea. "If Richard goes to
Palestine," s