l name of Henry. By his
subsequent exploits he filled the world with his renown. He was the
first of the Bourbon line who ascended the throne of France, and he
swayed the sceptre of energetic rule over that wide-spread realm with
a degree of power and grandeur which none of his descendants have ever
rivaled. The name of Henry IV. is one of the most illustrious in the
annals of France. The story of his struggles for the attainment of the
throne of Charlemagne is full of interest. His birth, to which we have
just alluded, occurred at Parr, in the kingdom of Navarre, in the year
1553.

His grandfather immediately assumed the direction of every thing
relating to the child, apparently without the slightest consciousness
that either the father or the mother of Henry had any prior claims.
The king possessed, among the wild and romantic fastnesses of the
mountains, a strong old castle, as rugged and frowning as the eternal
granite upon which its foundations were laid. Gloomy evergreens clung
to the hill-sides. A mountain stream, often swollen to an impetuous
torrent by the autumnal rains and the spring thaws, swept through the
little verdant lawn, which smiled amid the stern sublimities
surrounding this venerable and moss-covered fortress. Around the
solitary towers the eagles wheeled and screamed in harmony with the
gales and storms which often swept through these wild regions. The
expanse around was sparsely settled by a few hardy peasants, who, by
feeding their herds, and cultivating little patches of soil among the
crags, obtained a humble living, and by exercise and the pure mountain
air acquired a vigor and an athletic-hardihood of frame which had
given them much celebrity.

To the storm-battered castle of Courasse, thus lowering in congenial
gloom among these rocks, the old king sent the infant Henry to be
nurtured as a peasant-boy, that, by frugal fare and exposure to
hardship, he might acquire a peasant's robust frame. He resolved that
no French delicacies should enfeeble the constitution of this noble
child. Bareheaded and barefooted, the young prince, as yet hardly
emerging from infancy, rolled upon the grass, played with the poultry,
and the dogs, and the sturdy young mountaineers, and plunged into the
brook or paddled in the pools of water with which the mountain showers
often filled the court-yard. His hair was bleached and his cheeks
bronzed by the sun and the wind. Few would have imagined that the
unattractiv