reigns of the Valois princes, and the
religious dissensions that succeeded them, which gave Henry IV. his great
and deserved reputation. Like Napoleon, he calmed, by his acquisition of
the throne, the passions of a nation in arms against itself. The
hereditary feuds, the dreadful retaliations, the mutual proscriptions, the
fierce passions, the frightful revenge of the feudal and Huguenot wars,
were stilled as if by the wand of a mighty enchanter.

Henry IV. was the man of his age; and hence it was that he achieved this
prodigy. His mental and physical qualities were precisely those which his
time demanded; and it was this combination which enabled him to achieve
his astonishing success. Bold, active, and enterprising, he presented that
mixture of warlike virtues with chivalrous graces which it is the great
object of romance to portray, and which may be said to form the ideal of
the European character. He possessed that individual gallantry, that
personal daring, that spontaneous generosity, which, even more than
commanding intellectual qualities, succeed in winning the hearts of
mankind. Ever the foremost in attack, the last in retreat, he excelled his
boldest knights in personal courage. The battle-field was to him a scene
of exultation. He had the true heroic character. Like the youth in
Tacitus, he loved danger itself, not the rewards of valour. Nor were the
mental qualities and combinations requisite in the general awanting. On
the contrary, he possessed them in the very highest degree. Active,
enterprising, indefatigable, he was ever in the field with the advanced
guard, and often ran the greatest personal danger from his anxiety to see
with his own eyes the position or forces of the enemy. His skill in
partisan strife, on which so much of success in war then depended--in the
surprise of castles, the siege of towns, the capture of convoys, the
sudden irruption into territories, equalled all that poetry had conceived
of the marvellous. His deeds, as narrated by the cool pen of Sully,
resemble rather the fabulous exploits of knight-errantry than the events
of real life. It was thus, by slow degrees and painful efforts, that he
gradually brought up his inconsiderable party, at first not a fourth part
of the forces of the League, to something like a level with his formidable
opponents; and at length was enabled to rout them in decisive battles, and
establish his fortunes on a permanent foundation in the fields of Arques