canons were attacked in turn; nothing was spared except the cathedral,
before which axes and crowbars seemed to lose their power, and the
church of Ste. Eugenie, which was turned into a powder-magazine. The
day of the great butchery was called "La Michelade," because it took
place the day after Michaelmas, and as all this happened in the year
1567 the Massacre of St. Bartholomew must be regarded as a plagiarism.

But from this period, each flux and reflux bears more and more the
peculiar character of the party which for the moment is triumphant; when
the Protestants get the upper hand, their vengeance is marked by
brutality and rage; when the Catholics are victorious, the retaliation
is full of hypocrisy and greed. The Protestants pull down churches and
monasteries, expel the monks, burn the crucifixes, take the body of some
criminal from the gallows, nail it on a cross, pierce its side, put a
crown of thorns round its temples and set it up in the market-place--an
effigy of Jesus on Calvary. The Catholics levy contributions, take back
what they had been deprived of, exact indemnities, and although ruined
by each reverse, are richer than ever after each victory.

MARY STUEARE

Mary was a harmony in which the most ardent enthusiast for sculptured
form could have found nothing to reproach. This was indeed Mary's great
and real crime: one single imperfection in face or figure, and she would
not have died upon the scaffold. Besides, to Elizabeth, who had never
seen her, and who consequently could only judge by hearsay, this beauty
was a great cause of uneasiness and of jealousy, which she could not
even disguise, and which showed itself unceasingly in eager questions.

Unfortunately for her honour, Mary, always more the woman than the
queen, while, on the contrary, Elizabeth was always more the queen than
the woman, had no sooner regained her power than her first royal act was
to exhume Rizzio, who had been quietly buried on the threshold of the
chapel nearest Holyrood Palace, and to have him removed to the
burial-place of the Scottish kings, compromising herself still more by
the honours she paid him dead, than by the favour she had granted him
living.

NISIDA

The priests had already begun to sing the death hymn; the executioner
was ready, the procession had set out, when Solomon the fisherman
appeared suddenly on the threshold of the prison, his eyes aflame and
his brow radiant with the halo of t