some-times even going to his aid.  He thus played off the greater part of the undeclared attempts or armed expeditions by which, from 1186 to 1189, Philip tried to cut him short in his French possessions, and, so long as Henry IL lived, there were but few changes in the territorial proportions of the two states.  But, at Henry’s death, Philip found himself in a very different position towards Henry’s two sons, Richard Coeur de Lion and John Lackland.  They were of his own generation; he had been on terms with them, even in opposition to their own father, of complicity and familiarity:  they had no authority over him, and he had no respect for them.  Richard was the feudal prince, beyond comparison the boldest, the most unreflecting, the most passionate, the most ruffianly, the most heroic adventurer of the middle ages, hungering after movement and action, possessed of a craving spirit for displaying his strength, and doing his pleasure at all times and in all places, not only in contempt of the rights and well-being of his subjects, but at the risk of his own safety, his own power, and even of his crown.  Philip was of a sedate temperament, patient, persevering, moved but little by the spirit of adventure, more ambitious than fiery, capable of far-reaching designs, and discreet at the same time that he was indifferent as to the employment of means.  He had fine sport with Richard.  We have already had the story of the relations between them, and their rupture during their joint crusade in the East.  On returning to the West, Philip did not wrest from King Richard those great and definitive conquests which were to restore to France the greater part of the marriage-portion that went with Eleanor of Aquitaine; but he paved the way for them by petty victories and petty acquisitions, and by making more and more certain his superiority over his rival.  When, after Richard’s death, he had to do with John Lackland, cowardly and insolent, knavish and addle-pated, choleric, debauched, and indolent, an intriguing subordinate on the throne on which he made pretence to be the most despotic of kings, Philip had over him, even more than over his brother Richard, immense advantages.  He made such use of them that after six years’ struggling, from 1199 to 1205, he deprived John of the greater part of his French possessions, Anjou, Normandy, Touraine, Maine, and Poitou.  Philip would have been quite willing to dispense with any legal procedure by way of sanction to his conquests, but John furnished him with an excellent pretext; for on the 3d of April, 1203, he assassinated with his own hand, in the tower of Rouen, his young nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, and in that capacity vassal of Philip Augustus, to whom he was coming to do homage.  Philip had John, also his vassal, cited before the court of the barons of France, his peers, to plead his defence of this odious act.  “King John,” says the contemporary English historian Matthew Paris, “sent Eustace, Bishop of Ely, to tell King Philip that he