eat deal
deeper), for soldiers and military conduct, were the Duc de Guise, who
died at Orleans, and the late Marshal Strozzi; and for men of great
ability and no common virtue, Olivier and De l'Hospital, Chancellors of
France. Poetry, too, in my opinion, has flourished in this age of ours;
we have abundance of very good artificers in the trade: D'Aurat, Beza,
Buchanan, L'Hospital, Montdore, Turnebus; as to the French poets, I
believe they raised their art to the highest pitch to which it can ever
arrive; and in those parts of it wherein Ronsard and Du Bellay excel, I
find them little inferior to the ancient perfection. Adrian Turnebus
knew more, and what he did know, better than any man of his time, or long
before him. The lives of the last Duke of Alva, and of our Constable de
Montmorency, were both of them great and noble, and that had many rare
resemblances of fortune; but the beauty and glory of the death of the
last, in the sight of Paris and of his king, in their service, against
his nearest relations, at the head of an army through his conduct
victorious, and by a sudden stroke, in so extreme old age, merits
methinks to be recorded amongst the most remarkable events of our times.
As also the constant goodness, sweetness of manners, and conscientious
facility of Monsieur de la Noue, in so great an injustice of armed
parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity, and robbery), wherein he
always kept up the reputation of a great and experienced captain.

I have taken a delight to publish in several places the hopes I have of
Marie de Gournay le Jars,

[She was adopted by him in 1588. See Leon Feugere's Mademoiselle
de Gournay: 'Etude sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages'.]

my adopted daughter; and certainly beloved by me more than paternally,
and enveloped in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of
my own being: I have no longer regard to anything in this world but her.
And if a man may presage from her youth, her soul will one day be capable
of very great things; and amongst others, of the perfection of that
sacred friendship, to which we do not read that any of her sex could ever
yet arrive; the sincerity and solidity of her manners are already
sufficient for it, and her affection towards me more than superabundant,
and such, in short, as that there is nothing more to be wished, if not
that the apprehension she has of my end, being now five-and-fifty years
old, might not so much afflict he