been considered.

Yet it will be difficult for us to find the heroic individualised very
perceptibly at this period, look where we may. Already there seemed
ground for questioning the comfortable fiction that the accidentally
dominant families and castes were by nature wiser, better, braver than
that much-contemned entity, the People. What if the fearful heresy should
gain ground that the People was at least as wise, honest, and brave as
its masters? What if it should become a recognised fact that the great
individuals and castes, whose wealth and station furnished them with
ample time and means for perfecting themselves in the science of
government, were rather devoting their leisure to the systematic filling
of their own pockets than to the hiving up of knowledge for the good of
their fellow creatures? What if the whole theory of hereditary
superiority should suddenly exhale? What if it were found out that we
were all fellow-worms together, and that those which had crawled highest
were not necessarily the least slimy?

Meantime it will be well for us, in order to understand what is called
the Past, to scrutinise somewhat closely that which was never meant to be
revealed. To know the springs which once controlled the world's
movements, one must ponder the secret thoughts, purposes, aspirations,
and baffled attempts of the few dozen individuals who once claimed that
world in fee-simple. Such researches are not in a cheerful field; for the
sources of history are rarely fountains of crystal, bubbling through
meadows of asphodel. Vast and noisome are the many sewers which have ever
run beneath decorous Christendom.

Some of the leading military events in France and Flanders, patent to all
the world, which grouped themselves about the contest for the French
throne, as the central point in the history of Philip's proposed
world-empire, have already been indicated.

It was a species of triangular contest--so far as the chief actors were
concerned--for that vacant throne. Philip, Mayenne, Henry of Navarre,
with all the adroitness which each possessed, were playing for the
splendid prize.

Of Philip it is not necessary to speak. The preceding volumes of this
work have been written in vain, if the reader has not obtained from
irrefragable testimony--the monarch's own especially--a sufficient
knowledge of that human fetish before which so much of contemporary
humanity grovelled.

The figure of Navarre is also one of the mo