enjoyed himself very much, and had married
a lady as beautiful as itself! In Normandy,
he found Firebrand waiting to urge him to
assert his claim to the English crown and
declare war against King Henry. This, after
great loss of time in feasting and dancing with
his beautiful Italian wife among his Norman
friends, he at last did.

The English in general were on King
Henry's side, though many of the Normans
were on Robert's. But the English sailors
deserted the King, and took a great part of
the English Fleet over to Normandy; so that
Robert came to invade this country in no
foreign vessels, but in English ships. The
virtuous Anselm, however, whom Henry had
invited back from abroad, and made
Archbishop of Canterbury, was steadfast in the
King's cause; and it was so well supported
that the two armies, instead of fighting, made
a peace. Poor Robert, who trusted anybody
and everybody, readily trusted his brother,
the King; and agreed to go home and receive
a pension from England, on condition that all
his followers were fully pardoned. This the
King very faithfully promised, but Robert was
no sooner gone than he began to punish them.

Among them was the Earl of Shrewsbury,
who, on being summoned by the King to
answer to five and forty accusations, rode
away to one of his strong castles, shut
himself up therein, called round him his tenants
and vassals, and fought for his liberty, but
was defeated and banished. Robert, with all
his faults, was so true to his word, that when
he first heard of this nobleman having risen
against his brother, he laid waste the Earl of
Shrewsbury's estates in Normandy, to show
the King that he would favor no breach of
their solemn treaty. Finding, on better
information, afterwards, that the Earl's only
crime was having been his friend, he came
over to England, in his old thoughtless warm-
hearted way, to intercede with the King, and
remind him of the solemn promise to pardon
all his followers.

This confidence might have put the false
King to the blush, but it did not. Pretending
to be very friendly, he so surrounded his
brother with spies and traps, that Robert,
who was quite in his power, had nothing for
it but to renounce his pension and escape
while he could. Getting home to Normandy,
and understanding the King better now, he
naturally allied himself with his old friend
the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had still thirty
castles in that country. This was exactly
what Henry wanted. He immediately
declared that Robert had broken the treaty, and
next year invaded Normandy.

He pretended that he came to deliver the
Normans, at their own request, from his
brother's misrule. There is reason to fear that
his misrule was bad enough; for his beautiful
wife had died, leaving him with an infant
son, and his court was again so careless,
dissipated, and ill-regulated, that it was said he
sometimes lay in bed of a day for want of
clothes to put on—his attendants having
stolen all his dresses. But he headed his
army like a brave prince and a gallant soldier,
though he had the misfortune to be taken
prisoner by King Heniry, with four hundred of
his Knights. Among them was poor
harmless Edgar Atheling, who loved Robert well.
Edgar was not important enough to be severe
with. The King afterwards gave him a small
pension, which he lived upon and died upon,
in peace, among the quiet woods and fields of
England.

And Robert— poor, kind, generous, wasteful,
heedless Robert, with so many faults, and
yet with virtues that might have made a
better and a happier man, what was the end
of him? If the King had had the
magnanimity to say with a kind air, "Brother, tell
me, before these noblemen, that from this
time you will be my faithful follower and
friend, and never raise your hand against me
or my forces more! "he might have trusted
Robert to the death. But the King was not
a magnanimous man. He sentenced his
brother to be confined for life in one of the
Royal Castles. In the beginning of his
imprisonment, he was allowed to ride out,
guarded; but he one day broke away from
his guard and galloped off. He had the evil
fortune to ride into a swamp, where his
horse stuck fast and he was taken. When
the King heard of it, he ordered him to be
blinded, which was done by the putting of a
red-hot metal basin on his eyes.

And so, in darkness and in prison, many
years, he thought of all his past life, of the
time he had wasted, of the treasure he had
squandered, of the opportunities he had lost,
of the youth he had thrown away, of the
talents he had neglected. Sometimes, on fine
autumn mornings, he would sit and think of
the old hunting parties in the free Forest,
where he had been the foremost and the
gayest. Sometimes, in the still nights, he
would wake, and mourn for the many nights
that had stolen past him at the gaming table:
sometimes, would seem to hear, upon the
melancholy wind, the old songs of the
minstrels; sometimes, would dream, in his
blindness, of the light and glitter of the
Norman Court. Many and many a time, he
groped back, in his fancy, to Jerusalem where
he had fought so well; or, at the head of his
brave companions, bowed his feathered helmet
to the shouts of welcome greeting him in
Italy, and seemed again to walk among the
sunny vineyards, or on the shore of the blue
sea, with his lovely wife. And then, thinking
of her grave, and of his fatherless boy, he
would stretch out his solitary arms and weep.

At length, one day, there lay in prison,
dead, with cruel and disfiguring scars upon
his eyelids, bandaged from his jailer's sight,
but on which the eternal Heavens looked
down, a worn old man of eighty. He had
once been Robert of Normandy. Pity him!