nd capable as he was of very deep and lasting affection, he was
not demonstrative.

The soft, caressing manners of the Princess Margaret were not in her
husband's line at all. He was given to calling a spade a spade whenever
he had occasion to mention the article: and if she preferred to allude
to it as "an agricultural implement for the trituration of the soil," he
was disposed to laugh good-humouredly at the epithet, though he dearly
loved the silver voice which used it.

A thoroughly representative man of his time was Hubert de Burgh, Earl of
Kent; and he was one of those persons who leave a deep mark upon their
age. He was a purely self-made man. He had no pedigree: indeed, we do
not know with absolute certainty who was his father, though modern
genealogists have amused themselves by making a pedigree for him, to
which there is no real evidence that he had the least claim. Yet of his
wives--for he was four times married--the first was an heiress, the
second a baron's widow, the third a countess in her own right and a
divorced queen, and the last a princess. His public life had begun by
his conducting a negotiation to the satisfaction of Coeur-de-Lion, in
the first year of his reign, 1189, when in all probability Hubert was
little over twenty years of age. From that moment he rose rapidly.
Merely to enumerate all the titles he bore would almost take a page. He
was by turns a very rich man and a very poor one, according as his royal
and capricious master made or revoked his grants.

The religious character of Hubert is not a matter of speculation, but of
certainty. It was--what his contemporaries considered elevated piety--a
most singular mixture of the barest and basest superstition with some
very strong plain common-sense. The superstition was of the style set
forth in the famous Spanish drama entitled "The Devotion of the Cross"--
the true Roman type of piety, though to Protestant minds of the
nineteenth century it seems almost inconceivable. The hero of this
play, who is represented as tinctured with nearly every crime which
humanity can commit, has a miracle performed in his favour, and goes
comfortably to Heaven after it, on account of his devotion to the cross.
The innocent reader must not suspect the least connection between this
devotion and the atonement wrought upon the cross. It simply means,
that whenever Eusebio sees the shape of a cross--in the hilt of his
sword, the pattern of a woman's dr