Excerpt from Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, Vol. 5 Was the representative, through a double illegitimacy too splendid to reflect disgrace, of the great House of Beaufort, descended from John of Gaunt. So little has been said of him by our historians and biographers that, were it not for the intel ligence communicated by his own original letters, many of which I published some years since, we should be at a loss to form any just judgement of his character. We learn from those faithful records that he possessed not only a powerful and richly culti vated understanding, decorated by infinite politeness, but a fami liar and easy nature, and a vivacity of temper, at once too frank and too delicate for the imperfect taste of the Court in which he flourished. With this sanguine-disposition however, and in the possession of those almost unlimited powers of self gratification which exalted rank and great wealth at that time conferred, his moral conduct was\without reproach; and we need no better evidence of the innocence of one who stood so fair a mark for envy than the silence of detraction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.