he seemed a new St. Jerome."

Perhaps the most reasonable attitude to assume toward the problem is that
Lorenzo died as he lived, feeling that strange, restless curiosity as to
what was summed up in the idea of a "future life" which he had manifested
all his days: "If I believe aught implicitly," he is reported to have
said in earlier years to Alberti, "I believe in Plato's doctrine of
immortality in the _Phaedo,_ for religion is too much a matter of
temperament for us to lay down hard-and-fast rules about it." Lorenzo
outwardly conformed in his dying hours to the rites of the Catholic
Church. He received the _viaticum_ kneeling, he repeated the responses in
an earnest and fervent tone, and then, when he felt that the grains in
the hour-glass of life were running out, he pressed a crucifix to his
lips and so passed within the veil. As a humanist he had been reared, as
a humanist he had lived and labored, as a humanist he died, maintaining
to the very last his interest in those studies which it had been his
life's passion to pursue.

The sun of the Florentine renaissance had set forever!

[Footnote 1: By permission of Selmar Hess.]

DEATH OF CHARLES THE BOLD

LOUIS XI UNITES BURGUNDY WITH THE CROWN OF FRANCE

A.D. 1477

PHILIPPE DE COMINES

During the greater part of his rule as duke of Burgundy, Charles the
Bold was at war with Louis XI of France, notwithstanding the treaty of
Peronne, 1468, which the French monarch accepted under duress. Meanwhile
it was the constant aim of Charles to enlarge his dukedom, and when, in
1475, he had made another peace with Louis, the Duke turned anew to his
scheme of conquest.

Charles soon made himself master of Lorraine, which he had long coveted,
and then, 1476, invaded Switzerland. "It was reserved for a small people,
already celebrated for their heroic valor and their love of liberty, to
beat this powerful man." Crossing the Jura, Charles besieged the little
town of Granson, and after its capitulation he hanged or drowned all the
defenders. When the news of this barbarity had spread through Switzerland
the eight cantons arose, and almost under the walls of Granson the Swiss
inflicted upon Charles a crushing defeat. In June, 1476, the Duke saw his
second army destroyed by the Swiss and the Lorrainers, whom Comines calls
Germans. In the following winter Charles assembled a third army and
marched against Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, which was then held by
the same a