n 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
sight of it again; and, on the whole, that the _Dominus Rex,_ at
departing, gave us 'thirteen _sterlingii,'_ one shilling and one
penny, to say a mass for him; and so departed,--like a shabby
Lackland as he was! 'Thirteen pence sterling,' this was what the
Convent got from Lackland, for all the victuals he and his had
made away with. We of course said our mass for him, having
covenanted to do it,--but let impartial posterity judge with what
degree of fervour!

And in this manner vanishes King Lackland; traverses swiftly our
strange intermittent magic-mirror, jingling the shabby thirteen
pence merely; and rides with his hawks into Egyptian night
again. It is Jocelin's manner with all things; and it is men's
manner and men's necessity. How intermittent is our good
Jocelin; marking down, without eye to _us,_ what _he_ finds
interesting! How much in Jocelin, as in all History, and indeed
in all Nature, is at once inscrutable and certain; so dim, yet
so indubitable; exciting us to endless considerations. For King
Lackland was there, verily he; and did leave these _tredecim
sterlingii_ if nothing more, and did live and look in one way
or the other, and a whole world was living and looking along
with him! There, we say, is the grand peculiarity; the
immeasurable one; distinguishing, to a really infinite degree,
the poorest historical Fact from all Fiction whatsoever. Fiction,
'Imagination,' 'Imaginative Poetry,' &c. &c., except as the
vehicle for truth, or _fact_ of some sort,--which surely a man
should first try