wounded in the fray. So
extreme was the fanaticism at this time that, several Protestants,
after a sanguinary fight, having been buried on the battle-field
promiscuously in a pit with some Catholics who had fallen by their
side, the priests, even of Henry's army, ordered the Protestant bodies
to be dug up and thrown out as food for dogs.

While these scenes were transpiring in the vicinity of Dieppe, almost
every part of France was scathed and cursed by hateful war. Every
province, city, village, had its partisans for the League or for the
king. Beautiful France was as a volcano in the world of woe, in whose
seething crater flames, and blood, and slaughter, the yell of conflict
and the shriek of agony, blended in horrors which no imagination can
compass. There was an end to every earthly joy. Cities were bombarded,
fields of grain trampled in the mire, villages burned. Famine rioted
over its ghastly victims. Hospitals were filled with miserable
multitudes, mutilated and with festering wounds, longing for death.
Not a ray of light pierced the gloom of this dark, black night of
crime and woe. And yet, undeniably, the responsibility before God must
rest with the League. Henry IV. was the lawful king of France. The
Catholics had risen in arms to resist his rights, because they feared
that he would grant liberty of faith and worship to the Protestants.

The League adopted the most dishonorable and criminal means to
alienate from Henry the affections of the people. They forged letters,
in which the king atrociously expressed joy at the murder of Henry
III., and declared his determination by dissimulation and fraud to
root out Catholicism entirely from France. No efforts of artifice were
wanting to render the monarch odious to the Catholic populace. Though
the Duke of Mayenne occasionally referred to the old Cardinal of
Bourbon as the king whom he acknowledged, he, with the characteristic
haughtiness of the family of Guise, assumed himself the air and the
language of a sovereign. It was very evident that he intended to place
himself upon the throne.

Henry IV., with the money furnished by Elizabeth, was now able to pay
his soldiers their arrears. His army steadily increased, and he soon
marched with twenty-three thousand troops and fourteen pieces of
artillery to lay siege to Paris. His army had unbounded confidence in
his military skill. With enthusiastic acclamations they pursued the
retreating insurgents. Henry was now o