on
fire, when the trumpet sounds to battle. The headlong desperate charge,
the snow-white plume waving where the fire is hottest, the large capacity
for enjoyment of the man, rioting without affectation in the 'certaminis
gaudia', the insane gallop, after the combat, to lay its trophies at the
feet of the Cynthia of the minute, and thus to forfeit its fruits; all
are as familiar to us as if the seven distinct wars, the hundred pitched
battles, the two hundred sieges; in which the Bearnese was personally
present, had been occurrences of our own day.

He at least was both king and man, if the monarch who occupied the throne
was neither. He was the man to prove, too, for the instruction of the
patient letter-writer of the Escorial, that the crown of France was to be
won with foot in stirrup and carbine in hand, rather than to be caught by
the weaving and casting of the most intricate nets of diplomatic
intrigue, though thoroughly weighted with Mexican gold.

The King of Navarre was now thirty-one years old; for the three Henrys
were nearly of the same age. The first indications of his existence had
been recognized amid the cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and
his mother had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the world
at Pau. Thus, said his grandfather, Henry of Navarre, thou shalt not bear
to us a morose and sulky child. The good king, without a kingdom, taking
the child, as soon as born, in the lappel of his dressing-gown, had
brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic, and moistened them with a
drop of generous Gascon wine. Thus, said the grandfather again, shall the
boy be both merry and bold. There was something mythologically prophetic
in the incidents of his birth.

The best part of Navarre had been long since appropriated by Ferdinand of
Aragon. In France there reigned a young and warlike sovereign with four
healthy boys. But the new-born infant had inherited the lilies of France
from St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon the
motto "Espoir." His grandfather believed that the boy was born to revenge
upon Spain the wrongs of the House of Albret, and Henry's nature seemed
ever pervaded with Robert of Clermont's device.

The same sensible grandfather, having different views on the subject of
education from those manifested by Catherine de Medici towards her
children, had the boy taught to run about bare-headed and bare-footed,
like a peasant, among the mountains and ro