of religion, it kept his life pure and chivalrous. He was for ever
faithful to his future wife, even when Isabel had been returned to
France, and his romantic passion had fixed itself on her younger sister
Catherine, whom he endowed in imagination with all he had seen or
supposed in her.

Credited with every excess by the tongue of his stepmother, too active-
minded not to indulge in freakish sports and experiments in life very
astounding to commonplace minds, sometimes when in dire distress even
helping himself to his unpaid allowance from his father's mails, and
always with buoyant high spirits and unfailing drollery that scandalized
the grave seniors of the Court, there is full proof that Prince Hal ever
kept free from the gross vices which a later age has fancied inseparably
connected with his frolics; and though always in disgrace, the vexation
of the Court, and a by-word for mirth, he was true to the grand ideal he
was waiting to accomplish, and never dimmed the purity and loftiness of
his aim. That little band of princely youths, who sported, studied,
laughed, sang, and schemed in the glades of Windsor, were strangely
brought together--the captive exiled King, the disinherited heir of the
realm, and the sons of the monarch who held the one in durance and
occupied the throne of the other; and yet their affection had all the
frank delight of youthful friendship. The younger lads were in more
favour with their father than was the elder. Thomas was sometimes
preferred to him in a mortifying manner, John's grave, quiet nature
prevented him from ever incurring displeasure, and Humfrey was the spoilt
pet of the family; but nothing could lessen Harry's large-minded love of
his brothers; and he was the idol and hero of the whole young party, who
implicitly believed in his mighty destinies as a renovator of the world,
the deliverer of Jerusalem, and restorer of the unity and purity of the
Church.