splendor of a
crown, that, though I vehemently loved that king, and had the greatest
obligations to him, the thoughts of succeeding him obliterated my regret
at his loss, and the wish for my approaching coronation dried my eyes at
his funeral.

"But my fondness for the name of king did not make me forgetful of those
over whom I was to reign. I considered them in the light in which a
tender father regards his children, as persons whose wellbeing God
had intrusted to my care; and again, in that in which a prudent lord
respects his tenants, as those on whose wealth and grandeur he is to
build his own. Both these considerations inspired me with the greatest
care for their welfare, and their good was my first and ultimate
concern.

"The usurper Mauregas had impiously obliged himself and his successors
to pay to the Moors every year an infamous tribute of an hundred young
virgins: from this cruel and scandalous imposition I resolved to relieve
my country. Accordingly, when their emperor Abderames the second had the
audaciousness to make this demand of me, instead of complying with it I
ordered his ambassadors to be driven away with all imaginable ignominy,
and would have condemned them to death, could I have done it without a
manifest violation of the law of nations.

"I now raised an immense army; at the levying of which I made a speech
from my throne, acquainting my subjects with the necessity and the
reasons of the war in which I was going to engage: which I convinced
them I had undertaken for their ease and safety, and not for satisfying
any wanton ambition, or revenging any private pique of my own. They all
declared unanimously that they would venture their lives and everything
dear to them in my defense, and in the support of the honor of my crown.
Accordingly, my levies were instantly complete, sufficient numbers
being only left to till the land; churchmen, even bishops themselves,
enlisting themselves under my banners.

"The armies met at Alvelda, where we were discomfited with immense loss,
and nothing but the lucky intervention of the night could have saved our
whole army.

"I retreated to the summit of a hill, where I abandoned myself to the
highest agonies of grief, not so much for the danger in which I then saw
my crown, as for the loss of those miserable wretches who had exposed
their lives at my command. I could not then avoid this reflection--that,
if the deaths of these people in a war undertaken absolu