Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/205

 in the coinage of those times—he bade his officer take them away as unworthy of a king and bring him a pair worth a mark of silver. The cunning chamberlain brought a worse pair, which he professed to have bought at the higher price, and which Rufus accordingly pronounced to be worthy of a King's majesty. Such a tale could not have been believed or invented except of a man in whose nature true dignity, true greatness of soul, found no place, but who was puffed up with a feeling of his own importance, which, if it could sometimes be shaped into the likeness of something nobler, could also sometimes sink into vanity of the silliest and most childish kind.

But the quality for which the Red King was most famous in his own day, a quality which was, we are told, blazed abroad through all lands, East and West, was what his own age called his boundless liberality. The wealth of England was a standing subject of wonder in other lands, and in the days of Rufus men wondered no less at the lavish way in which it was scattered abroad by the open hand of her King. But the liberality of Rufus had no claim to that name in its higher sense. It was not that kind of liberality which spends un-*