Montfort was being drifted away from the strength of his original position. The common sense of mankind re-echoed the sentiments of Urban, and denounced as a mockery all attempts at negociation between a subject and his prisoner-king. Until the king was at liberty, there could be no valid treaty; yet to release the king was to give the signal for war, and for a war of so doubtful an issue, that it was impossible to dare the venture. A power unknown to the constitution, a power which would be sure to move the jealousy of his own equals in rank, and to excite just apprehension even in unbiassed minds, had become, chiefly through the one false step of making the king his prisoner, an unhappy necessity to Montfort. He had begun to feel this; he evidently knew his difficulty; but he knew also where he was strong. In the days of the Great Charter, the firmest supports of the popular cause had been the clergy and the city of London, and they were again the firmest supporters of Montfort. Nothing is more remarkable in his career than the enthusiastic confidence which he felt, and which he inspired in the most eminent churchmen of his day. He was, as we have seen, the intimate friend of Grosseteste and Adam de Marisco. With Grosseteste he habitually advised, and to him he committed in his own absence the care of his children. The loss of the learned, though less celebrated, Archdeacon of Leicester, John of Basingstoke, he is said to have felt as one of the heaviest sorrows of his life; and in his last parliament of 1265, when his influence was paramount, and his ambition, whatever it may have been, most transparent to the world, there was chosen as chancellor Thomas Cantilupe, the last Englishman who has attained to a place in the Roman calendar. The clerical poetry of the day compares him with the most popular of all English saints. Comme ly martyr de Canterbyr, finist sa vie; Ne voleit pas li bon Thomas que perist seinte Eglise, His own language, his life, the eulogy of his friends, concur to show that he regarded himself, and was regarded by others, as pre-eminently the champion of the Church. And we know enough of his career to understand at least the main outline of his policy. It was essentially the policy of a statesman as opposed to a king. The temptation which no holder of the crown found himself altogether able to resist, was to make common cause with the Pope at the expense of the Church at home. The abuse of provisions, superseding the rights of the capitular electors, as well as of private patrons, was the subject of continual remonstrance. The Crown was obliged to present to the Pope the the petitions which were forced upon itself; but it was never thoroughly in earnest, and the chapters were compelled to accept the Papal nominee of to-day, with the understanding that they should be equally obliged to receive the royal nominee of tomorrow. So also in the matter of taxation. The English Church appealed to the Crown to protect it against Roman exaction; but the Crown found it ever more profitable to acquiesce and to share in the spoliation. Montfort would have confided to the Church a full freedom in her elections; he would have protected her firmly against foreign encroachments on her privileges and on her revenues; and he would have trusted by so doing to make her intensely national in feeling-the strongest, because the most intelligent supporter of the Crown. In precisely the same spirit he would have dealt with the rising importance of the towns. The towns had been hitherto regarded as almost a sort of royal chattel. They derived their corporate existence from the simple fiat of the Crown, which had obtained in return, and in spite of the Great Charter had continued to exercise, the power of imposing tallages, dues, and customs almost at absolute discretion. They were consequently, of course, in a state of chronic disaffection. Montfort would have dealt with them, as with the national Church, in a freer and more confiding spirit. He would have liberated their commerce, confirmed their selfgovernment, and trusted to them to uphold the Government whose supporting hand they felt. His feeling was well known; he had in at least one notable instance interfered or pleaded with the Crown on behalf of the City of London; he had led the citizens very early to make his cause their own, and he found them true to the end. It was, therefore, not simply the expedient of a revolutionary chief in difficulties, but the expression of a settled and matured policy, when, in December 1264, he issued in the King's name the ever-memorable writs which summoned the first complete Parliament which ever met in England. The earls, barons, and bishops received their summons as of course; and with them the deans of cathedral churches, an unprecedented number of abbots and priors, two knights from every shire, and two citizens or burgesses from every city or borough in England. Of their proceedings we know but little; but they appear to have appointed Simon de Montfort to the office of Justiciar of England, and to have thus made him in rank, what he had before been in power, the first subject in the realm. It is a curious matter for speculation whether the early acquaintance with the institutions of Arragon which Montfort, through his father, must almost certainly have possessed, sug gested gested to his mind the model on which he proposed to popularise the institutions of England. In Arragon the towns had early obtained an important place in the great council of the nation; in Arragon also the justiciar was the most powerful of all subjects, and less an officer of the Crown than a servant of the nation at large, controlling with an almost tribunician power the proceedings of the King himself. Montfort, at all events, had now gone so far, he had exercised such extraordinary powers, he had done so many things which could never really be pardoned, that perhaps his only chance of safety lay in the possession of some such office as this. It is certain, moreover, that something which passed in this Parliament, or almost exactly at the time of its meeting, did cause deep offence to a considerable section of the barons. The young Earl of Gloucester, the successor to his father's politics and influence, withdrew himself, not alone, from Montfort. Difficulties were visibly gathering thicker around him, and he was evidently conscious that disaffection was spreading fast; the Welsh and Scotch borders were far from quiet; the French threatened to co-operate by sea with the disaffected royalists in the north; and so exceptional a state of things was fraught with imminent peril. Negociations went forward, not very smoothly, for the release of Prince Edward. They were terminated in May by his escape. It was the signal for a royalist rising. Edward took the command of the Welsh border; before the middle of June he had made the border his own. On the 29th Gloucester opened its gates to him. He had many secret friends. He pushed fearlessly eastward, and surprised the garrison of Kenilworth, commanded by Simon, the Earl's second son. The Earl himself lay at Evesham, awaiting the troops which his son was to bring up from Kenilworth, when the approach of a considerable force was announced. To his joy he saw familiar banners flying, for the unexplained delay of which he had already been uneasy. He mounted the convent tower, that he might see them better. He saw them but too well. The banners were his son's, but they were flying in the van of an enemy. His first words revealed a soldier's pride. By the arm of St. James, they come on well; they learnt that order from me.' His next told that he had measured the forces, and knew that the event was hopeless. May God have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are Prince Edward's.' On the fatal field of Evesham, fighting side by side to the last, fell the Earl himself, his eldest son Henry, Despenser the late Justiciar, Lord Basset of Drayton, one of his firmest friends, and a host of minor name. With them, to all appearance, fell the cause for which they had fought. The The remainder of the reign of Henry is passed in the monotony of a feeble despotism. But the victor of Evesham was the true pupil of the vanquished: and the statesmanship of Montfort is interwoven, warp and woof, into the government of Edward I. The posthumous fame of rebels is generally measured by their success; but to the memory of the great Earl his countrymen were more than just-they awarded to him the honours not of a statesman, but of a saint and martyr. There are extant forms of prayer which were said in his honour, and the story of miracles which he was believed to have wrought. No Englishman but St. Thomas of Canterbury ever received from the popular voice an adoration so ardent, so entirely exceeding the bounds of loving and respectful admiration. The legendary halo which surrounded him diffused its light even beyond himself, it shed its lustre over his unworthy sons: and one of the most graceful of English ballads records that Henry de Montfort, apparently slain at Evesham, survived in blindness and obscurity to carry down to one more generation the inheritance of so illustrious a name. The sober voice of a late posterity, while admitting to the full the faults of an ungoverned temper, and an imperious impatience of the infinite littleness by which Leicester was mistrusted and confined; while granting that, at any rate in his later years, he was borne on by the pressure of circumstances into acts of ambition and self-aggrandisement, which may be palliated, but not defended, will yet be slow to draw darkly the shadows of a great character. And when the full survey is taken, we shall not forget what is due to the statesman who first struck the key-note of constitutional government, and showed that there was more both of wisdom and of strength in a confiding appeal to a free people, than in the coercive despotism of the first Plantagenets. We shall remember, too, that he applied his principle with a breadth of view and an evenness of hand too rare in later times to the Church as well as to the State, and that almost alone of feudal statesmen he perceived that the just privileges of a national clergy might become not the chronic difficulty of the State, but her surest and least perishable safeguard. Lastly, we shall bear in mind that, over the coarse ignorance and impure rudeness of the old feudal manners, he bore himself in calm, gentle superiority, cultivated, refined, and unsullied, the very model of an English gentleman: so English in heart, so true to the land of his adoption, that we almost forget, as we think of him, the parentage that is implied in the name of Simon de Montfort. ART. ART. III.-Enoch Arden, etc. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. London, 1864. BUT UT few years have elapsed since we devoted an article to the Poetry of the Laureate; and a fresh poem of his has already become famous. Scarcely indeed has any work of his issued from the press when it is found in almost every drawing-room in England, and as fast as steam can carry it, it is borne in thousands to every market where the English tongue is spoken; so eager are all to read. Maidens bend their faces over the page, and sinking slowly down where they stood, are lost in the story of Elaine or of Arden; and fathers, in the quiet evening, will trust to the poet's care those tenderer thoughts which love to dwell in secret. It is strange, to one who thinks of it, this vast and silent power which the modern poet wields. Our bards stand no more in the midst of the people, speaking to them burning words, or bowing before the acclaim of a myriad tongues. They pass no more from side to side of the market-place, or from street to country ways, gathering around them young and old in little wondering circles. The power of the older singers was more directly reflected in action, but yet bears no comparison with the power of him who now can weave in secret a magic web of waving lines, and by the infinite multiplication of the press can gather at once kingdoms and continents under his spell. The printing-press, perfect as it now seems to be, is a means to Mr. Tennyson of a power at once wider and more immediate than ever fell to the lot of poet. Perhaps since its invention no poet has, during his lifetime, obtained so extensive an audience. The several poems of Lord Byron were greedily bought up as they appeared, but the reading circles at home were then very much narrower, and the poems of Lord Byron had not the same command of large colonial societies. Moreover they obtained notoriety rather than favour, and were often read for their worse qualities for that kind of sentiment which gives a flash of life to our so-called 'sensation' novels. But we shall return to the question of Mr. Tennyson's popularity after a review of that last volume of his whose title now stands at the head of our page. In this book we have many pieces collected; pieces of various degrees of merit, and of various pretension. The poem of Enoch Arden, placed first, and giving its name to the volume, is at once the longest and most important, and also bears evident marks of being a cherished work, perfected by untiring and affectionate care. In point of execution it ranks with Elaine and Guinevere, and in point of story it ranks with those domestic idylls for |