Even my distinguished friend, Mr. Cadaverous, who never made a
mistake in his life, and whose memory for facts is portentous--even
Mr. Cadaverous assures me that he has never met with any mention of
the above fact in all his study of history.
History! What is history but the science which teaches us to see the
throbbing life of the present in the throbbing life of the past?
Note that these "gentlemen of the House of Commons," who made
themselves somewhat disagreeable in the Parliament of 1348, were not
the warriors who had gone out to fight the King's battles, but the
burghers who stayed at home, heaped up money, and grumbled. It was
otherwise with the roistering swash-bucklers who came back in that
glorious autumn. They are said to have returned laden with the spoils
of France, the plunder of Calais, and so on and so on. Calais must
have been rather a queer little place to afford much _plunder_
after all that it had gone through. The swash-bucklers doubtless
brought prize-money home, but it did not all come from France--that
is pretty certain. Villani, our Florentine friend, tells us of an
unexampled commercial crisis at Florence about this time--brought
about, observe, by the English conqueror of France not paying his
debts. So the Bardi and the Peruzzi actually stopped payment; for the
King owed them a million and a half of gold florins, and there was
lamentation and distress of mind, and the level of the Arno rose by
reason of the flood of tears that fell "from tired eyelids upon tired
eyes.
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