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some minutes, and she seemed to join in the chorus, but suddenly her voice ceased, and, on looking round, the page perceived that his mistress had breathed her last.

"When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

"The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,
To bring repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom, is-to die."

A man influenced by true religion may fall once and again, but had the character of Condé been such as the leader of a religious movement ought to possess, no woman of Catherine's discernment would have conceived such a scheme, and the first advances in executing it would have been repelled with scorn.

Again we meet with Condé under circumstances where religious principle is tried to the uttermost-the near prospect of death. By the treachery of Francis II., he and his brother Anthony were seized, and, after a mock trial, were left under sentence of death on a vague charge of treason. The Cardinal of Lorraine was most anxious to have Condé executed at once, but his connexion with the royal family was pleaded in his behalf, and the vacillating spirit of Catherine was anxious to be free from his influence, but afraid of the power of his rivals: under such uncertainty we might expect some traits of religious feeling; but the contemporary accounts give us little on the subject. The death of Francis changed the whole face of affairs, and one of Condé's attendants, who went to communicate the intelligence to him, found him quietly playing at cards with the officer who guarded him; and being afraid to tell him directly, made signs that he had something to communicate. The prince let fall a card, and stooping to pick it up, his attendant whispered in his ear, "Our friend is done up." The prince finished his game without altering a feature. Much, however, as we must regret the want of religious feeling in the prince, we must remember the difference between those times and the present, and make every allowance for the differences of education and the darkness of the age. Condé was sincere in his attachment to Protestantism, and never wavered in its cause. Sometimes at the head of a victorious army; sometimes a prisoner in the tent of his rival, and meeting him with the courtesy of an old and valued friend; sometimes flying from a superior force, unable to pay his mercenaries, and

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with equal reason to fear his own troops and the royal army, he displays a degree of heroism which we seldom meet with, except in romance. The Alcibiades of modern history, fond of pleasure, but faithful to his cause, anxious on the subject of religion, but sometimes inclined to superstition, erring in many instances, but beloved by all around him, his character and adventures give an opening for the historian which modern events seldom afford, and we can assure our readers that our author has not neglected the opportunity. We extract a passage from his history.

"Condé, who regarded a battle as inevitable, wished to halt and prepare to meet the enemy; but the admiral, judging from the excessive reserve that had already been shown, that this movement was intended as a demonstration only, was for proceeding without delay. His advice prevailed, and the dawn of the 19th found the Hugonot army still upon their march. I will relate,' says Beza, 'two things that occurred, which seemed as if sent from God as presages of what was approaching; and that I can attest for true, having seen the one with my own eyes, and heard the other with my own ears. The first is that the prince, crossing a little river at Maintenon (he passed Maintenon on the 17th), where some of the lower orders had assembled to see him go by—an aged woman flung herself into the river, which was deep (the rivulet having been trampled in by the passing of the cavalry), and stopping him short, laid hold of his boot, and said, 'Go on, prince, you will suffer much, but God will be with you.' To which he added, ' Mother, pray for me,' and went on. The other was, that in the evening, the prince being in bed, and talking with some who had remained in his chamber, held the following discourse to a minister who had been there, and was reading prayers (probably Beza himself), 'We shall have a battle to-morrow,' said he, or I am much deceived, in spite of what the admiral says. I know one ought not to attend to dreams, and yet I will tell you what I dreamed last night. It was that it seemed to me that I had given battle three times, one after the other; finally obtaining the victory-and that I saw our three enemies dead; but that I also had received my death-wound. So, having ordered their bodies to be laid one upon the other, and I upon the top of all, I there rendered up my soul to God.' The minister answered, as usually a sensible man would answer in such cases, that such visions were not to be regarded. Yet strange to say (adds Beza), the dream seemed confirmed by the result. The next day the Maréchal de St. André was killed, then the Duke of Guise, then the constable, and finally, after the third engagement, the prince himself."-Reformation, vol. i. p. 400.

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Again, in 1568, when Lorraine and Alva had first persuaded the Hugonots to lay down their arms, and then proclaimed the decrees of the Council of Trent, Condé had retired to his country seat. In the mean time, strange reports had been spread that

no Protestant would be alive against the vintage; that Charles must either exterminate them, or retire to a monastery; that to keep faith with heretics is a weakness, and to murder them a service acceptable to God. Several of the adherents of Condé had been slain, some as if by the king's order, some by popular violence. The clubs of Paris had begun to show their power, and had declared for the pope; and the first movement was made for the formation of the celebrated ligue. Condé naturally began to fear for his personal safety, and while consulting with Coligny on the proper course to be adopted, Coligny's son-in-law arrived, bearing friendly letters from the king, but advising his relations not to trust the royal promises. The same evening a mysterious note was intercepted, containing these ominous words, "The stag is in the toils the hunt is ready!" and at the dead of night an unknown cavalier galloped by the castle, sounding his huntinghorn, and crying, "The great stag has broken cover at Noyers." Condé acted on these warnings, and escaped with his brother's family and his own, closely pursued by the king's troops. He crossed the Loire at a ford not commonly known, the prince holding his infant in his arms. Though the river was generally too deep for crossing, yet on this occasion there was no difficulty in passing the ford, until Condé and his troop of about 150 persons had landed in safety. Immediately, however, as if by a special interposition of Providence, the stream rose above its usual height, foaming and rushing with a sudden torrent, so that the pursuers, who crowded rapidly upon the further bank, saw that they were too late, and their expected prey had escaped from their hands. Condé was killed at the battle of Jarnac, after he had surrendered as a prisoner of war; he is supposed to have owed his death to the treachery of the Duke of Anjou, afterwards Henry III.

The man of the highest sense of religion, in our acceptation of the word, was the Admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny. To his influence may be attributed the strictness and sobriety which usually characterized the Protestant army. Games of chance were strictly forbidden; swearing and plundering were severely punished; and the forms of religion steadily observed. "I fear," said Coligny to one who complimented him on these subjects, "that it will not last long-a young hermit is an old devil:" "the French infantry will soon become tired of their virtue, and put the cross into the fire." His predictions were only too true, as the event proved. Coligny himself combined the characters of a soldier and a reformer more than any of his contemporaries. Brantôme compares him with the Duke of Guise. He says they were diamonds of the first water, on the superior

excellence of which it would be impossible to decide. They had been intimate friends in youth, wearing the same dresses, taking the same side in the tournaments, joining in the same mischievous pranks, and encouraging each other in extravagant follies. Coligny, however, soon grew tired of youthful excesses; he seems to have understood the principle,

"Nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum,"

for as a man we never find him drawn into the excesses of the court, or imitating his friend Condé in the pursuit of pleasure. His rules for the conduct of his soldiers were adopted even by his enemies; and he was the first who raised the character of a French army, and placed it above the level of a horde of barbarous invaders, whose chief object was plunder, without respect even to their own allies. He attempted to procure for France a just system of representative government; and he is said, by his influence during the civil wars, to have preserved the lives and properties of more than a million of persons. His wife, Charlotte de Laval, was devoted to the Protestant cause. She established in his family a system of propriety seldom witnessed in the households of the great. We have a minute description of Coligny's household, the regularity of his hours, his family prayers, and his instruction of his dependants; but he seems to have stood almost alone: few in that age could appreciate his virtues; and though his influence over the Prince de Condé was exerted for good, yet he was but one among a multitude, and his salutary influence was often overborne by the evils incident to a civil war. This great man survived the other leaders of his party, and was the first victim of the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

Another reason why intelligence and Protestantism made little progress was the ignorance of the times. We do not speak so much of the great body of the people, as of those who may be supposed to have received the best education. When the Duke of Guise was wounded by an assassin, during the siege of Orleans, the surgeons at first augured favourably of his recovery, but they evidently killed him by their unskilful treatment: first, they widened and cauterized with a hot silver instrument, to destroy the effects of the poison which they imagined to be in the powder and bullets. They were astonished to find that the bullet had made a larger hole at its exit than at its entrance, and therefore agreed to open the wound again in order to look for it, though the age of the moon pointed out the day as unfavourable. They then with their fingers examined both sides of the wound, and found all safe and sound: not

satisfied with the progress which nature was making, they made another opening across the wound, and passed a piece of linen through it, by way of a seton, to keep it open; and though this was on the fourth day of the moon, the duke was better, though his fever increased. Some of his friends wanted him to try the effect of enchantments-we confess we should have preferred them to the treatment of his surgeons-but the duke refused them as unlawful means, and declared that he should prefer death to the prospect of life by remedies forbidden by God. When we consider the ignorance of one learned profession, and recollect that it had become a proverb to say, "as ignorant as a priest," we cannot much wonder at the darkness of the people; and we cannot feel much surprised that they should be led into excesses by the advice of a cruel nobility and an ambitious priesthood.

Great allowance must be made for the differences of the age from ours; and we must remember that until the works of John Locke, toleration, in our sense of the word, was never understood. Uniformity of opinion was the grand object; the Council of Trent met for the purpose of settling what men ought to believe, with the full expectation of being able to persuade them that it was their duty to do so, and a full determination to exterminate all recusants. Some of the more moderate party did not expect to be able to bind the opinions of others; these only said that outward conformity to established usage should be sufficient; and that no inquiry should be made as to religious sentiments, provided only the people should attend mass and confession. The Hugonots themselves never expected equal privileges with the dominant party: all they asked was, leave to have their own churches, and administer the sacraments; and they even proposed that they should pay double taxes as a test of their sincerity. These reasonable demands were frequently promised, but the promises were broken as soon as the Hugonots had laid down their arms.

Persecution, burning heretics by legal warrant, were as common as in England during the reign of Bloody Mary; but France went a step further than England, and often murdered the recusants without the shadow or pretence of law. We can scarcely imagine, even from the worst portions of the history of England, that a nobleman of high rank, like the Duke of Guise, should set out on a progress to his country seat, and suddenly massacre a whole congregation of men, women, and children while on his journey. Yet this took place at Vassy, on Sunday morning, the first of March, 1562. The duke declared that it was done against his will, and in consequence of an insult offered by the Hugonots to some of his followers; but whatever. VOL. X.-NO. XIX.-SEPT. 1848.

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