, and is drawn and sharp and
clean as a thing can be.

Such is the whole line, but look at this one Valois and you see all the
qualities of his race toned by a permanent sadness down to a good and
even temper, not hopeful but still delighting in beauty and possessed as
no other Valois had been of charity. Less passionate and therefore much
less eager and useful than most of his race, yet the taint of madness
never showed in him, nor the corresponding evil of cruelty, nor the
uncreative luxury of his immediate ancestry. All the Valois were poets
in their kind; his life by its every accident caused him to write. At
fifteen they wedded him to that lovely child whom Richard II had lifted
in his arms at Windsor as he rode out in fatal pomp for Ireland. Three
years later, when their marriage was real, she died in childbirth, and
it is to her I think that he wrote in his prison the ballad which ends:

Dieu sur tout souverain seigneur
Ordonnez par grace et douceur
De l'ame d'elle tellement
Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
En peine souci et douleur.

Already, in the quarrel that so nearly wrecked the crown, the
anti-national factions had killed his father. He was planning vengeance,
engraving little mottoes of hate upon his silver, when the wars came on
them all. A boy of twenty-four, well-horsed, much more of a soldier than
he later seemed, he charged, leading the centre of the three tall troops
at Agincourt. In the evening of that disaster they pulled him out from
under a great heap of the ten thousand dead and brought him prisoner
into England, to Windsor then to Pomfret Castle. Chatterton, Cobworth,
at last John Cornwall, of Fanhope, were his guardians. To some one of
these--probably the last--he wrote the farewell:

Mon tres bon hote et ma tres douce hotesse.

For his life as a prisoner, though melancholy, was not undignified; he
paid no allegiance, he met the men of his own rank, nor was he of a kind
to whom poverty, the chief thorn of his misfortune, brought dishonour.

Henry V had left it strictly in his will that Orleans the general and
the head of the French nationals should not return. For twenty-five
years, therefore--all his manhood--he lived under this sky, rhyming and
rhyming: in English a little, in French continually, and during that
isolation there swept past him far off in his own land the defence, the
renewal, the triumph of his own blood: his town relieved, his cousin
crowned at