ins of the French monarchy than he did. His pretension, however, was
easily refuted by Henschenius, who showed that he had himself discovered
this derelict king twelve years before Valesius turned his thoughts to
the subject, having published in 1654 a dissertation upon him distinct
from those embodied in the "Acta Sanctorum." Hallam, in his "History of
the Middle Ages," introduces this king, and notices that his history had
escaped all historians till discovered by some learned men in the
seventeenth century, for it is in this vague way he alludes to the
Bollandists--and then refers for his authority to Sismondi, who in turn
knows nothing of the Bollandists' share in the discovery, but attributes
it to Mabillon when treating of the "Acts of the Benedictine Saints."
Let us again take up Hallam, and we shall in vain search for notices of
the kings of Majorca, a branch of the Royal family of Arragon, who
reigned over the Balearic Islands in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Let any one, however, desirous of a picture of the domestic
life of sovereigns during the Middle Ages, take up Papebrock's treatise
on the "Palatine Laws" of James II., King of Majorca, A.D. 1324, where
he will see depicted--all the more minutely because from the size of his
principality the king had no other outlet for his energy--the ritual of
a mediaeval Court, illustrated, too, with pictures drawn from the
original manuscript. In this document are laid down with painful
minuteness, the duties of every official from the chancellor and the
major-domo to the lowest scullions and grooms, including butlers, cooks,
blacksmiths, musicians, scribes, physicians, surgeons, chaplains,
choir-men, and chamberlains. Remote, too, as these kings of Majorca and
their elaborate ceremonial may seem to be from the England of to-day, a
careful study of these "Palace Laws" would seem to indicate either that
our own Court Ritual was derived from it, or else that both are deduced
from one common stock. The point of contact, however, between our own
Court etiquette and that of Majorca is not so very hard to find. The
kings of Arragon, acting on the usual principle, might is right,
devoured the inheritance of their kinsmen, which lay so tantalizingly
close to their own shores, during the lifetime of the worthy legislator,
James II. But as Greece led captive her conqueror, Rome, so too Arragon,
though superior in brute force, bowed to the genius of Majorca, at least
on