judge with severe justice, that his extraordinary popularity in
London, where he was daily seen, was never diminished by his faults;
he was so bold in the field, yet so mild in the chamber; when his
passions slept, he was so thoroughly good-natured and social, so kind
to all about his person, so hearty and gladsome in his talk and in his
vices, so magnificent and so generous withal; and, despite his
indolence, his capacities for business were marvellous,--and these
last commanded the reverence of the good Londoners; he often
administered justice himself, like the caliphs of the East, and with
great acuteness and address. Like most extravagant men, he had a
wholesome touch of avarice. That contempt for commerce which
characterizes a modern aristocracy was little felt by the nobles of
that day, with the exception of such blunt patricians as Lord Warwick
or Raoul de Fulke. The great House of De la Pole (Duke of Suffolk),
the heir of which married Edward's sister Elizabeth, had been founded
by a merchant of Hull. Earls and archbishops scrupled not to derive
revenues from what we should now esteem the literal resources of
trade. [The Abbot of St. Alban's (temp. Henry III.) was a vendor of
Yarmouth bloaters. The Cistercian Monks were wool-merchants; and
Macpherson tells us of a couple of Iceland bishops who got a license
from Henry VI. for smuggling. (Matthew Paris. Macpherson's "Annals of
Commerce," 10.) As the Whig historians generally have thought fit to
consider the Lancastrian cause the more "liberal" of the two, because
Henry IV. was the popular choice, and, in fact, an elected, not an
hereditary king, so it cannot be too emphatically repeated, that the
accession of Edward IV. was the success of two new and two highly--
popular principles,--the one that of church reform, the other that of
commercial calculation. All that immense section, almost a majority
of the people, who had been persecuted by the Lancastrian kings as
Lollards, revenged on Henry the aggrieved rights of religious