account is, as usual, vivid, accurate, and instructive (Theodor Beza, ii.
706, etc.). Varillas, Anquetil, etc., are scarcely worth examining. There
is the ordinary amount of blundering about the simplest matters of
chronology. Davila places the wounding of Guise on the 24th of February,
his death three days later, etc.

[246] Mem. de Conde, i. 124; Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 164.

[247] Claude Haton, i. 325, 326.

[248] See Riez's letter to the king, reprinted in Mem. de Conde, iv.
243-265, and in Cimber and Danjou's invaluable collection of contemporary
pamphlets and documents, v. 171-204; Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., ii. 164.

[249] Hist. eccles. des egl. ref., _ubi supra_. There is extant an
affecting letter from the aged Renee of Ferrara to Calvin, in which she
complains with deep feeling of the reformed, and especially their
preachers, for the severity with which even after his death they attacked
the memory of her son-in-law, and even spoke of his eternal condemnation
as an ascertained fact. "I know," she said, "that he was a persecutor; but
I do not know, nor, to speak freely, do I believe that he was reprobated
of God; for he gave signs to the contrary before his death. But they want
this not to be mentioned, and they desire to shut the mouths of those who
know it." Cimber et Danjou, v. 399, etc. Calvin's reply of the 24th of
January, 1564, is admirable for its kind, yet firm tone (Bonnet, Lettres
franc. de Calvin, ii. 550, etc., Calvin's Letters, Am. edit., iv. 352,
etc.). He freely condemned the beatification of the King of Navarre, while
the Duke of Guise was consigned to perdition. The former was an apostate;
the latter an open enemy of the truth of the Gospel from the very
beginning. Indeed, to pronounce upon the doom of a fellow-sinner was both
rash and presumptuous, for there is but one Judge before whose seat we all
must give account. Yet, in condemning the authors of the horrible troubles
that had befallen France, and which all God's children had felt scarcely
less poignantly than Renee herself, sprung though she was from the royal
stock, it was impossible not to condemn the duke "who had kindled the
fire." Yea, for himself, although he had always prayed God to show Guise
mercy, the reformer avowed, in almost the very words of Beza, that he had
often desired that God would lay His hand upon the duke to free His Church
of him, unless He would convert him. "And yet I can protest," he added,
"that