f his courtiers, hearing nothing but abuse of Warwick
and sneers at his greatness, he began to think the hour had come when he
might reign alone, and he entered, though tacitly, and not acknowledging
it even to himself, into the very object of the womankind about
him,--namely, the dismissal of his minister.

The natural carelessness and luxurious indolence of Edward's temper did
not however permit him to see all the ingratitude of the course he was
about to adopt. The egotism a king too often acquires, and no king so
easily as one like Edward IV., not born to a throne, made him consider
that he alone was entitled to the prerogatives of pride. As sovereign
and as brother, might he not give the hand of Margaret as he listed?
If Warwick was offended, pest on his disloyalty and presumption! And so
saying to himself, he dismissed the very thought of the absent earl,
and glided unconsciously down the current of the hour. And yet,
notwithstanding all these prepossessions and dispositions, Edward might
no doubt have deferred at least the meditated breach with his great
minister until the return of the latter, and then have acted with the
delicacy and precaution that became a king bound by ties of
gratitude and blood to the statesman he desired to discard, but for
a habit,--which, while history mentions, it seems to forget, in
the consequences it ever engenders,--the habit of intemperance.
Unquestionably to that habit many of the imprudences and levities of a
king possessed of so much ability are to be ascribed; and over his cups
with the wary and watchful De la Roche Edward had contrived to entangle
himself far more than in his cooler moments he would have been disposed
to do.

Having thus admitted our readers into those recesses of that cor
inscrutabile,--the heart of kings,--we summon them to a scene peculiar
to the pastimes of the magnificent Edward. Amidst the shades of the
vast park, or chase, which then appertained to the Palace of Shene, the
noonday sun shone upon such a spot as Armida might have dressed for the
subdued Rinaldo. A space had been cleared of trees and underwood, and
made level as a bowling-green. Around this space the huge oak and
the broad beech were hung with trellis-work, wreathed with jasmine,
honeysuckle, and the white rose, trained in arches. Ever and anon
through these arches extended long alleys, or vistas, gradually lost
in the cool depth of foliage; amidst these alleys and around this space
num