Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/303

, self-engrossed, self-confident, self-willed; unscrupulous in act, violent and crafty, but justifying to himself, by his belief in himself, both unscrupulousness, violence, and craft. A man who regarded himself as the highest justice, and who looked on mercy as a mere human weakness. And with all this, as needs must have been, a very unhappy man, wretched in his family, wretched in his friends, wretched in his servants, most wretched in his loneliness: that awful loneliness in which a king lives, and which the worst as well as the best of despots realises. Have I drawn the outline of a monster? Well, perhaps; but not the popular notion of this particular portent. A strong, high-spirited, ruthless, disappointed, solitary creature; a thing to hate, or to pity, or to smile at, or to shudder at, or to wonder at, but not to judge.