in that unlucky old Merlin, some of whose
unluckly old prophecies somebody seemed
always doomed to remember when there was
a chance of its doing harm; and just at this
time some blind old gentleman with a harp
and a long white beard, who was an excellent
person, but had become of an unknown age
and tedious, burst out with a declaration
that Merlin had predicted that when English
money should become round, a Prince of
Wales would be crowned in London. Now,
King Edward had recently forbidden the
English penny to be cut up into halves and
quarters for halfpence and farthings, and had
actually introduced a round coin; therefore,
the Welsh people said this was the time
Merlin meant, and rose accordingly.

King Edward had bought over Prince
DAVID, Llewellyn's brother, by heaping favors
upon him; but he was the first to revolt,
being perhaps troubled in his conscience.
One stormy night, he surprised the Castle of
Hawarden, in possession of which an English
nobleman had been left; killed the whole
garrison, and carried off the nobleman a
prisoner to Snowdon. Upon this, the Welsh
people rose like one man. King Edward,
with his army, marching from Worcester to
the Menai Strait, crossed it—near to where
the wonderful tubular iron bridge now, in
days so different, makes a passage for Railway
Trains—by a bridge of boats that
enabled forty men to march abreast. He
subdued the Island of Anglesea, and sent his
men forward to observe the enemy. The sudden
appearance of the Welsh created a panic
among them, and they fell back to the bridge.
The tide had in the meantime risen and
separated the boats; the Welsh pursuing them,
they were driven into the sea, and there they
sunk, in their heavy iron armour, by
thousands. After this Victory Llewellyn, helped
by the severe winter-weather of Wales, gained
another battle; but, the King ordering a
portion of his English army to advance through
South Wales and catch him between two foes,
and Llewellyn bravely turning to meet this
new enemy, he was surprised and killed—very
meanly, for he was unarmed and defenceless.
His head was struck off and sent to London,
where it was fixed upon the Tower, encircled
with a wreath, some say of ivy, some say
of willow, some say of silver, to make it
look like a ghastly coin in ridicule of the
prediction.

David, however, still held out for six
months, though eagerly sought after by the
King, and hunted by his own countrymen.
One of them finally betrayed him with his
wife and children. He was sentenced to be
hanged, drawn, and quartered; and, from
that time, this became the established punishment
of Traitors in England—a punishment
which is wholly without excuse as being
revolting, vile, and cruel, after its object is
dead; and which has no sense in it, as its
only real degradation (and that nothing can
blot out), is to the country that permits on
any consideration such abominable barbarity.

Wales was now subdued. The Queen
giving birth to a young prince in the Castle
of Carnarvon, the King showed him to the
Welsh people as their countryman, and called
him Prince of Wales; a title that has ever
since been borne by the heir-apparent to the
English Throne—which that little Prince soon
became, by the death of his elder brother.
The King did better things for the Welsh
than that, by improving their laws and
encouraging their trade. Disturbances still
took place, chiefly occasioned by the avarice
and pride of the English Lords, on whom
Welsh lands and castles had been bestowed;
but they were subdued, and the country never
rose again. There is a legend that to
prevent the people from being incited to
rebellion by the songs of their bards and
harpers, Edward had them all put to death.
Some of them may have fallen among other
men who held out against the King; but
this general slaughter is, I think, a fancy of
the harpers themselves, who, I dare say, made
a song about it many years afterwards, and
sang it by the Welsh firesides until it came
to be believed.

The foreign war of the reign of Edward the
First arose in this way. The crews of two
vessels, one a Norman ship, and the other an
English ship, happened to go to the same place
hi their boats to fill their casks with fresh
water. Being rough angry fellows, they began
to quarrel, and then to fight—the English
with their fists; the Normans with their
knives—and, in the fight a Norman was killed.
The Norman crew, instead of revenging
themselves upon those English sailors with whom
they had quarrelled (who were too strong for
them, I suspect), took to their ship again in a
great rage, attacked the first English ship they
met, laid hold of an unoffending merchant
who happened to be on board, and brutally
hanged him in the rigging of their own vessel
with a dog at his feet. This so enraged
the English sailors that there was no
restraining him; and whenever, and wherever,
English sailors met Norman sailors, they fell
upon each other tooth and nail. The Irish
and Dutch sailors took part with the English;
the French and Genoese sailors helped the
Normans; and thus the greater part of the
mariners sailing over the sea became, in their
way, as violent and raging as the sea itself
when it is disturbed.

King Edward's fame had been so high
abroad that he had been chosen to decide a
difference between France and another foreign
power, and had lived upon the continent three
years. At first, neither he nor the French
King PHILIP (the good Louis had been dead
some time) interfered in these quarrels; but,
when a fleet of eighty English ships engaged
and utterly defeated a Norman fleet of two
hundred, in a pitched battle fought round a