course of
clemency and forgiveness, and reminded him that the nearer kings approach
to God in station, the more they should endeavor to imitate him in his
attributes of benignity. But the language of this farewell was more
tender than had been the spirit of her government. One looks in vain,
too, through the general atmosphere of kindness which pervades the
epistle; for a special recommendation of those distinguished and doomed
seigniors, whose attachment to her person and whose chivalrous and
conscientious endeavors to fulfil her own orders, had placed them upon
the edge of that precipice from which they were shortly to be hurled. The
men who had restrained her from covering herself with disgrace by a
precipitate retreat from the post of danger, and who had imperilled their
lives by obedience to her express instructions, had been long languishing
in solitary confinement, never to be terminated except by a traitor's
death--yet we search in vain for a kind word in their behalf.

Meantime the second civil war in France had broken out. The hollow truce
by which the Guise party and the Huguenots had partly pretended to
deceive each other was hastened to its end; among other causes, by the
march of Alva, to the Netherlands. The Huguenots had taken alarm, for
they recognized the fellowship which united their foes in all countries
against the Reformation, and Conde and Coligny knew too well that the
same influence which had brought Alva to Brussels would soon create an
exterminating army against their followers. Hostilities were resumed with
more bitterness than ever. The battle of St. Denis--fierce, fatal, but
indecisive--was fought. The octogenarian hero, Montmorency, fighting like
a foot soldier, refusing to yield his sword, and replying to the
respectful solicitations of his nearest enemy by dashing his teeth down
his throat with the butt-end of his pistol, the hero of so many battles,
whose defeat at St. Quintin had been the fatal point in his career, had
died at last in his armor, bravely but not gloriously, in conflict with
his own countrymen, led by his own heroic nephew. The military control of
the Catholic party was completely in the hand of the Guises; the
Chancellor de l'Hopital had abandoned the court after a last and futile
effort to reconcile contending factions, which no human power could
unite; the Huguenots had possessed themselves of Rochelle and of other
strong places, and, under the guidance of adroit stat