Had James been a little more discerning, or a little less obstinate, those despatches would have induced him to reconsider all his plans.

The Commissioners wrote hopefully.

The conditions proposed by the conqueror were strangely liberal.

The King himself could not refrain from exclaiming that they were more favourable than he could have expected.

He might indeed not unreasonably suspect that they had been framed with no friendly design: but this mattered nothing; for, whether they were offered in the hope that, by closing with them, he would lay the ground for a happy reconciliation, or, as is more likely, in the hope that, by rejecting them, he would exhibit himself to the whole nation as utterly unreasonable and incorrigible, his course was equally clear.