ught about by circumstances
connected with the rivalry between Francis and the emperor
Charles V. The enmity of the two latter and their repeated
wars form a principal subject of European history during
many years.

Francis came to the throne in 1515, and the first four years
of his reign were marked by brilliant successes, which
brought him fame as a ruler and a warrior. But in 1519 he
was an unsuccessful candidate for the imperial dignity, and
Charles, being preferred before him, became emperor of the
Holy Roman Empire.

Great was the mortification of Francis and he soon after
declared war against his rival. Both sought the alliance of
Henry VIII, and in hopes of securing his friendship, and
thereby preventing a union of the Emperor and the English
King against himself, Francis arranged the meeting so
brilliantly pictured by Brewer. But Francis, by overdoing
this gorgeous reception, gave offence to Henry, whom he
seemed to eclipse in magnificence. Meanwhile Charles,
anticipating the interview, had visited Henry in England,
and by his more politic address he secured the favor both of
the English monarch and his great minister, Cardinal Wolsey.

Situated in a flat and uninviting plain--poor and barren, as the
uncultivated border-land of the two kingdoms--Guines and its castle
offered little attraction, and if possible less accommodation, to the
gay throng now to be gathered within its walls. Its weedy moat and
dismantled battlements, "its keep too ruinous to mend," defied the
efforts of carpenters and bricklayers, as the English commissioners
pathetically complained; and could not by any artifice or contrivance be
made to assume the appearance of a formidable, or even a respectable,
fortress to friend or enemy. But on the castle green, within the limits
of a few weeks, and in the face of great difficulties, the English
artists of that day contrived a summer palace, more like a vision of
romance, the creation of some fairy dream--if the accounts of
eye-witnesses of all classes may be trusted--than the dull, every-day
reality of clay-born bricks and mortar.

No "palace of art" in these beclouded climates of the West ever so truly
deserved its name. As if the imagination of the age, pent up in wretched
alleys and narrow dwelling-houses, had resolved for once to throw off
its ordinary trammels and recompense itse