(crosspost)

[pilfered_words]

(Responding to this post about Jane Austen being unimpressed with Henry IV)

OK, but compare it with this:

 

The King’s health sank more and more, and he became subject to violent eruptions on the face and to bad epileptic fits, and his spirits sank every day.  At last, as he was praying before the shrine of St. Edward at Westminster Abbey, he was seized with a terrible fit, and was carried into the Abbot’s chamber, where he presently died.  It had been foretold that he would die at Jerusalem, which certainly is not, and never was, Westminster.  But, as the Abbot’s room had long been called the Jerusalem chamber, people said it was all the same thing, and were quite satisfied with the prediction.

 

The King died on the 20th of March, 1413, in the forty-seventh year of his age, and the fourteenth of his reign.  He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral.  He had been twice married, and had, by his first wife, a family of four sons and two daughters.  Considering his duplicity before he came to the throne, his unjust seizure of it, and above all, his making that monstrous law for the burning of what the priests called heretics, he was a reasonably good king, as kings went.

 

- Dickens, A Child’s History of England