pomp, for the fugitive and his offspring were the bread of the exile,
or the refuge of the outlaw.

But still the earl's prosperity was hollow, the statue of brass stood
on limbs of clay. The position of a man with the name of subject, but
the authority of king, was an unpopular anomaly in England. In the
principal trading-towns had been long growing up that animosity
towards the aristocracy of which Henry VII. availed himself to raise a
despotism (and which, even in our day, causes the main disputes of
faction); but the recent revolution was one in which the towns had had
no share. It was a revolution made by the representative of the
barons and his followers. It was connected with no advancement of the
middle class; it seemed to the men of commerce but the violence of a
turbulent and disappointed nobility. The very name given to Warwick's
supporters was unpopular in the towns. They were not called the
Lancastrians, or the friends of King Henry,--they were styled then,
and still are so, by the old chronicler, "The Lord's Party." Most of
whatever was still feudal--the haughtiest of the magnates, the rudest
of the yeomanry, the most warlike of the knights--gave to Warwick the
sanction of their allegiance; and this sanction was displeasing to the
intelligence of the towns.

Classes in all times have a keen instinct of their own class-
interests. The revolution which the earl had effected was the triumph
of aristocracy; its natural results would tend to strengthen certainly
the moral, and probably the constitutional, power already possessed by
that martial order. The new parliament was their creature, Henry VI.
was a cipher, his son a boy with unknown character, and according to
vulgar scandal, of doubtful legitimacy, seemingly bound hand and foot
in the trammels of the archbaron's mighty House; the earl himself had