bolical
to treat as a success. During the first part of his life he was the
stalking-horse of Bernard d'Armagnac; during the second, he was the
passive instrument of English diplomatists; and before he was well
entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of
Burgundian treason. On each of these occasions, a strong and not
dishonourable personal motive determined his behaviour. In 1407 and the
following years he had his father's murder uppermost in his mind.
During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more
immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a sentiment of
gratitude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to
break with the tradition of his party and his own former life. He was
born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman.
He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a
petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism;
but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his
fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour. In England, he could
comfort himself by the reflection that "he had been taken while loyally
doing his devoir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the
previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by
wasteful feud. This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps
most happily exampled out of his own mouth. When Alencon stood accused
of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a
speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once.
Alencon, he said, had professed a great love and trust towards him; "yet
did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy;
whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year,
and might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us
Frenchmen." These are the words of one, mark you, against whom
Gloucester warned the English Council because of his "great subtility
and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the impatience of
Louis XI. if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political
deliberation.

This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and
narrow view, was fundamentally characteristic of the man as well as of
the epoch. It is not even so striking in his public life, where he
failed, as in his poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we
might expect a poet to