n rein,
and leave us! Let tyrants and cowards enforce reluctant service,--my
crown was won by the hearts of my people! Girded by those hearts, let me
reign, or, mourned by them, let me fall! So God and Saint George favour
me as I speak the truth!"

And as the king ceased, he uncovered his head, and kissed the cross
of his sword. A thrill went through the audience. Many were there,
disaffected to his person, and whom Warwick's influence alone could have
roused to arms; but at the close of an address spirited and loyal in
itself, and borrowing thousand-fold effect by the voice and mien of the
speaker, no feeling but that of enthusiastic loyalty, of almost tearful
admiration, was left in those steel-clad breasts.

As the king lifted on high the cross of his sword, every blade leaped
from its scabbard, and glittered in the air; and the dusty banners in
the hall waved, as to a mighty blast, when, amidst the rattle of armour,
burst forth the universal cry, "Long live Edward IV.! Long live the
king!"

The sweet countess, even amidst the excitement, kept her eyes anxiously
fixed on Warwick, whose countenance, however shaded by the black plumes
of his casque, though the visor was raised, revealed nothing of
his mind. Her daughters were more powerfully affected; for Isabel's
intellect was not so blinded by her ambition but that the kingliness
of Edward forced itself upon her with a might and solemn weight, which
crushed, for the moment, her aspiring hopes.

Was this the man unfit to reign? This the man voluntarily to resign a
crown? This the man whom George of Clarence, without fratricide, could
succeed? No!--there spoke the soul of the First and the Third Edward!
There shook the mane and there glowed the eye of the indomitable lion
of the august Plantagenets! And the same conviction, rousing softer and
holier sorrow, sat on the heart of Anne; she saw, as for the first time,
clearly before her the awful foe with whom her ill-omened and beloved
prince had to struggle for his throne. In contrast beside that form,
in the prime of manly youth--a giant in its strength, a god in its
beauty--rose the delicate shape of the melancholy boy who, afar in
exile, coupled in his dreams, the sceptre and the bride! By one of those
mysteries which magnetism seeks to explain, in the strong intensity of
her emotions, in the tremor of her shaken nerves, fear seemed to grow
prophetic. A stream as of blood rose up from the dizzy floors. The image