OF PROPHECY; AND JEHANE IN THE PERILOUS BED Well may the respectable Abbot Milo despond over this affair.

Hear him, and conceive how he shook his head.

'O too great power of princes,' he writes, 'lodged in a room too frail! O wagging bladder that serves as cushion for a crown! O swayed by idle breath, seeming god that yet is a man, man driven by windy passion, that has yet to ape the god's estate! Because Richard craved this French girl, therefore he must take her, as it were, from the lap of her mother.

Because he taught her his nobility, which is the mere wind in a prince's nose, she taught him nobility again.

Then because a prince must not be less noble than his nobles (but always _primus inter pares_), he, seeing her nobly disposed, gave her over to a man of her own choosing; and immediately after, unable to bear it that a common person should have what he had touched, took her away again, doing slaughter to get her, to say nothing of outrage in the church.