on. But
they _do_ say, that this was merely a genteel flourish, and that he was
afterwards seen to pick it up and pocket it.

There was an unfortunate prophet, the name of Peter, who had greatly
increased King John's terrors by predicting that he would be unknighted
(which the King supposed to signify that he would die) before the Feast
of the Ascension should be past. That was the day after this
humiliation. When the next morning came, and the King, who had been
trembling all night, found himself alive and safe, he ordered the
prophet--and his son too--to be dragged through the streets at the tails
of horses, and then hanged, for having frightened him.

As King John had now submitted, the Pope, to King Philip's great
astonishment, took him under his protection, and informed King Philip
that he found he could not give him leave to invade England. The angry
Philip resolved to do it without his leave but he gained nothing and lost
much; for, the English, commanded by the Earl of Salisbury, went over, in
five hundred ships, to the French coast, before the French fleet had
sailed away from it, and utterly defeated the whole.

The Pope then took off his three sentences, one after another, and
empowered Stephen Langton publicly to receive King John into the favour
of the Church again, and to ask him to dinner. The King, who hated
Langton with all his might and main--and with reason too, for he was a
great and a good man, with whom such a King could have no
sympathy--pretended to cry and to be _very_ grateful. There was a little
difficulty about settling how much the King should pay as a recompense to
the clergy for the losses he had caused them; but, the end of it was,
that the superior clergy got a good deal, and the inferior clergy got
little or nothing--which has also happened since King John's time, I
believe.

When all these matters were arranged, the King in his triumph became more
fierce, and false, and insolent to all around him than he had ever been.
An alliance of sovereigns against King Philip, gave him an opportunity of
landing an army in France; with which he even took a town! But, on the
French King's gaining a great victory, he ran away, of course, and made a
truce for five years.

And now the time approached when he was to be still further humbled, and
made to feel, if he could feel anything, what a wretched creature he was.
Of all men in the world, Stephen Langton seemed raised up by Heaven to
op