"His majesty the king!" whispered he, in his grave, solemn manner,
which filled Catharine with secret dread, as though he were
pronouncing the sentence of death over her.

But she forced a smile and advanced to the door to receive the king.
Now was heard a thunder-like rumble, and over the smoothly carpeted
floor of the anteroom came rolling on the king's house equipage.
This house equipage consisted of a large chair, resting on castors,
which was moved by men in the place of horses, and to which they
had, with artful flattery, given the form of a triumphal car of the
old victorious Roman Caesars, in order to afford the king, as he
rolled through the halls, the pleasant illusion that he was holding
a triumphal procession, and that it was not the burden of his heavy
limbs which fastened him to his imperial car. King Henry gave ready
credence to the flattery of his truckle-chair and his courtiers, and
as he rolled along in it through the saloons glittering with gold,
and through halls adorned with Venetian mirrors, which reflected his
form a thousandfold, he liked to lull himself into the dream of
being a triumphing hero, and wholly forgot that it was not his
deeds, but his fat, that had helped him to his triumphal car.

For that monstrous mass which filled up the colossal chair, that
mountain of purple-clad flesh, that clumsy, almost shapeless mass,
that was Henry the Eighth, king of merry England. But thae mass had
a head--a head full of dark and wrathful thoughts, a heart full of
bloodthirsty and cruel lusts. The colossal body was indeed, by its
physical weight, fastened to the chair. Yet his mind never rested,
but he hovered, with the talons and flashing eye of the bird of
prey, over his people, ever ready to pounce upon some innocent dove,
to drink her blood, and tear out her heart, that he might lay it,