d truces. The king and the
queen-mother would have been very glad that the St. Bartholomew should be
short-lived also, as a necessary but transitory crisis; it had rid them
of their most formidable adversaries, Coligny and the Reformers of note
who were about him. Henry and Catherine aspired to no more than resuming
their policy of manoeuvring and wavering between the two parties engaged
in the struggle; but it was not for so poor a result that the ardent
Catholics had committed the crime of the St. Bartholomew; they promised
themselves from it the decisive victory of their church and of their
supremacy. Henry de Guise came forward as their leader in this grand
design; there are to be read, beneath a portrait of him done in the
sixteenth century, these verses, also of that date:--

"The virtue, greatness, wisdom from on high,
Of yonder duke, triumphant far and near,
Do make bad men to shrink with coward fear,
And God's own Catholic church to fructify.
In armor clad, like maddened Mars he moves;
The trembling Huguenot cowers at his glance;
A prop for holy church is his good lance;
His eye is ever mild to those he loves."

Guise cultivated very carefully this ardent confidence on the part of
Catholic France; he recommended to his partisans attention to little
pious and popular practices. "I send you some paternosters [meaning, in
the plural, the beads of a chaplet, or the chaplet entire]," he wrote to
his wife, Catherine of Cleves; "you will have strings made for them and
string them together. I don't know whether you dare offer some of them
to the queens and to my lady mother. Ask advice of Mesdames de Retz and
de Villeroy about it." The flight and insurrection of the Duke of Anjou
and the King of Navarre furnished the Duke of Guise with a very natural
occasion for re-engaging in the great struggle between Catholicism and
Protestantism, wherein the chief part belonged to him. Let us recur, for
a moment, to the origin of that struggle and the part taken in it, at the
outset, by the princes of the house of Lorraine. "As early as the year
1562, twenty-six years before the affair of the barricades," says M.
Vitet in the excellent introduction which he has put at the head of his
beautiful historic dramas from the last half of the sixteenth century,
"Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, being at the Counci