t rooms.(2)

1 _Lettres de Marguerite (Pieces justificatives_. No. xi.).

2 Bascle de Lagreze's _Chateau de Pau, &c._

A few years later--in June 1555--the remains of King Henry, Margaret's
husband, were in turn brought to Lescar for burial. The tombs of husband
and wife, however, have alike vanished, having been swept away during
the religious wars, when Lescar was repeatedly stormed and sacked, when
Huguenot and Catholic, in turn triumphant, vented their religious frenzy
upon the graves of their former sovereigns; and to-day the only tombs
to be found in the old cathedral are those of personages interred there
since the middle of the seventeenth century.

January 1893.

ON THE HEPTAMERON,

WITH SOME NOTICE OF PRECEDENT COLLECTIONS OF TALES IN FRANCE, OF THE
AUTHOR, AND OF HER OTHER WORKS.

It is probable that every one who has had much to do with the study of
literature has conceived certain preferences for books which he knows
not to belong absolutely to the first order, but which he thinks to have
been unjustly depreciated by the general judgment, and which appeal to
his own tastes or sympathies with particular strength. One of such books
in my own case is _THE HEPTAMERON_ of Margaret of Navarre. I have read
it again and again, sometimes at short intervals, sometimes at longer,
during the lapse of some five-and-twenty years since I first met with
it. But the place which it holds in my critical judgment and in my
private affections has hardly altered at all since the first reading.
I like it as a reader perhaps rather more than I esteem it as a critic;
but even as a critic, and allowing fully for the personal equation, I
think that it deserves a far higher place than is generally accorded to
it.

Three mistakes, as it seems to me, pervade most of the estimates,
critical or uncritical, of the _Heptameron_, the two first of old date,
the third of recent origin. The first is that it is a comparatively
feeble imitation of a great original, and that any one who knows
Boccaccio need hardly trouble himself to know Margaret of Navarre. The
second is that it is a loose if not obscene book, disgraceful for a lady
to have written (or at least mothered), and not very creditable for
any one to read. The third is that it is interesting as the gossip of
a certain class of modern newspapers is interesting, because it tells
scandal about distinguished personages, and has for its interlocutors
other disti