he real sovereign.
The answer of Queen Elizabeth, when the success of her reign was imputed
to the capacity of her ministers, "Did you ever know a fool choose a wise
one?" affords the decisive reply to all such depreciatory attempts. Under
his beneficent rule, industry was protected, commerce revived; canals,
roads, and bridges penetrated the country in every direction; and, most
marvellous of all, religious schisms were healed and religious fury
stilled. The abjuration by the successful monarch of the faith in which he
had been bred, and the warriors of which had combated for him, was
unquestionably a measure called for, in a temporal view, by the interest
of his dominions at the time, not less than by his own tenure of the
throne. When it is recollected that the Huguenots did not at that period
exceed two millions, among twenty which France contained, it becomes at
once apparent, that, in a country so recently convulsed by the passions of
religious and civil dissension, conformity with the faith of the great
majority was the sole condition on which tranquillity could have been
restored, discord appeased, a stable government established, or the crown
transmitted to the descendants of the reigning monarch. And, while his
biographer must lament the necessity to which he was subjected, of bending
religious conviction to political expedience, all must admire the wisdom
of the Edict of Nantes, which, without shocking the prejudices of the
Catholics, secured liberty of conscience and just immunities to the
Protestants; and which, if adhered to by succeeding monarchs, on the
equitable spirit in which it had been conceived by its author, would
probably have left the direct heirs of Henry IV. still on the throne of
France, and averted all the bloodshed and horrors of the Revolution.

Henry IV., however, was not a perfect character; had he been so, he would
not have been a child of Adam. He had the usual proportion of the
weaknesses, some of the faults, of humanity. They were, for the most part,
however, of that kind which are nearly allied to virtues, and to which
heroic characters have, in every age, in a peculiar manner been subject.
Heroism, love, and poetry, ever have and ever will be found united: they
are, in truth, as Lamartine has expressed it, twin sisters of each other;
they issued at a single birth from the same parents. We may regret that it
is so; but if we do, we had better extend our regrets a little farther,
and