of such horrid tragedies, with words written
in labels, complaining that the executioners were not zealous enough in
this holy work. These prints, accompanied by libels and by horrid
narratives, inflamed the popular indignation, and more particularly the
women, who were affected to tears, as if these horrid scenes had been
passing before their eyes.

Montluc replied to the libels as fast as they appeared, while he
skilfully introduced the most elaborate panegyrics on the Duke of
Anjou; and in return for the caricatures, he distributed two portraits
of the king and the duke, to show the ladies, if not the diet, that
neither of these princes had such ferocious and inhuman faces. Such are
the small means by which the politician condescends to work his great
designs; and the very means by which his enemies thought they should
ruin his cause, Montluc adroitly turned to his own advantage. Anything
of instant occurrence serves electioneering purposes, and Montluc
eagerly seized this favourable occasion to exhaust his imagination on an
ideal sovereign, and to hazard, with address, anecdotes, whose
authenticity he could never have proved, till he perplexed even
unwilling minds to be uncertain whether that intolerant and inhuman duke
was not the most heroic and most merciful of princes. It is probable
that the Frenchman abused even the license of the French _eloge_, for a
noble Pole told Montluc that he was always amplifying his duke with such
ideal greatness, and attributing to him such immaculate purity of
sentiment, that it was inferred there was no man in Poland who could
possibly equal him; and that his declaration, that the duke was not
desirous of reigning over Poland to possess the wealth and grandeur of
the kingdom, and that he was solely ambitious of the honour to be the
head of such a great and virtuous nobility, had offended many lords, who
did not believe that the duke sought the Polish crown _merely_ to be the
sovereign of a virtuous people.

These Polish statesmen appear, indeed, to have been more enlightened
than the subtle politician perhaps calculated on; for when Montluc was
over anxious to exculpate the Duke of Anjou from having been an actor in
the Parisian massacre, a noble Pole observed, "That he need not lose his
time at framing any apologies; for if he could prove that it was the
interest of the country that the duke ought to be elected their king, it
was all that was required. His cruelty, were it true,