• CHAPTER I. THE PARENTS OF EDWARD L OF all the royal suitors that ever stooped to woo the love of woman, Henry III. son of John Lackland and Isabella of Angoulême, appears to have been the most luckless and unfortunate. He first fixed his affections upon the Princess of Scotland, who was dissuaded from listening to his suit, by her brother's assurance that the king was a squint-eyed fool, deceitful, perjured, more faint-hearted than a woman, and utterly unfit for the company of any fair and noble lady. Disappointed in Scotland, the monarch next offered his hand to the heiress of Brittany, but the rugged Bretons, too well remembering the cruelty of his father, to their beloved Prince Arthur, returned a haughty refusal. He then proposed to confer the honor of his alliance upon a daughter of Austria, but the fair descendant of Leopold inherited all her grandfather's enmity to the princely house of Plantagenet, and rejected his addresses with disdain. The Duke of Bohemia, to whom he- next applied, civilly answered that his child was already plighted to another, and it was not until Henry reached the mature age of thirty that he received a favorable response to his matrimonial proposal ; and when at last the marriage contract was signed between himself and Joanna, daughter of Alice of France, the roving affections of this royal Coelebs were beguiled from their allegiance by the sweet strains of the youthful poetess of Provence. Eleanor la Belle, second daughter of Count Berenger, perhaps the youngest female writer on record, attracted the