ct of the fine arts to produce. It has one immense advantage--it
possesses unity of subject, it is characterised by singleness of interest.
The virtues or vices, the triumphs or misfortunes, the glories or ruin of
one individual, form the main subject of the narrative. It is on them that
the attention of the writer is fixed; it is to enhance their interest that
his efforts are exhausted. The actions of others, the surrounding events,
only require to be displayed in so far as they bear upon, or are connected
with the exploits of the hero. But as great men usually appear in, or
create by their single efforts, important eras in the annals of mankind,
it rarely happens that the characters selected for biography are not
surrounded by a cluster of others, which renders their Lives almost a
general history of the period during which they communicated their impress
to the events of the world; and thus their biography combines unity of
interest with the highest importance in event.

This was pre-eminently the case with the history of Henry IV. of France.
So important, indeed, were the events crowded into his lifetime, so great
and lasting have been the consequences of his triumph, so prodigious the
impulse which his genius communicated, not only to his own country, but to
Europe, that he may almost be said to have created an era in modern times.
The first of the Bourbon family, he was, in truth, the founder of the
French monarchy, in one sense of the term. He first gave it unity,
consistence, and power; he first rendered it formidable to the liberties
of Europe. Before his time, during the reigns of the princes of the House
of Valois, it was rather a cluster of separate and almost independent
feudatories, than a compact and homogeneous empire. So powerful were these
great vassals, so slender the force which the crown could command to
control them, that France on many occasions made the narrowest possible
escape from sharing the fate of Germany, and seeing in its chief
nobles--the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, the Counts of
Toulouse--independent monarchs rendering, like the electors of
Brandenberg, Saxony, and Bavaria, only a nominal allegiance to their
feudal superior. The religious wars, which broke out with the Reformation,
still farther increased the divisions, and severed the ties of this
distracted kingdom.

The contest of the rural nobility of the south, attached to the new
opinions as fervently as the Scottish Covenante