oper and laudable spirit, that
they who had ventured upon such propositions must imagine them strangely
careless of the personal safety of their sovereign.

Charles IX. was particularly anxious that Elizabeth, as a pledge of
friendship, should consent to stand sponsor to his new-born daughter;
and with this request, after some difficulties and a few declarations of
horror at his conduct, she had the baseness to comply. She refused
however to indulge that king in his further desire, that she would
appoint either the earl of Leicester or lord Burleigh as her proxy;--not
choosing apparently to trust these pillars of state and of the
protestant cause within his reach; and she sent instead her cousin the
earl of Worcester, "a good simple gentleman," as Leicester called him,
and a catholic.

All this time Elizabeth was in her heart as hostile to the court of
France as the most zealous of her protestant subjects; for she well knew
that it was and ever must be essentially hostile to her and her
government; and in the midst of her civilities she took care to supply
to the Hugonots such secret aids as should enable them still to
persevere in a formidable resistance.

It is worth recording, on the subject of these negotiations between
Elizabeth and the royal family of France, that Burleigh seems to have
been encouraged to expect a successful issue by a calculation of the
queen's nativity, seen by Strype in his own handwriting, from which it
was foretold that she should marry, in middle life, a foreign prince
younger than herself; and probably be the mother of a son, who should be
prosperous in his middle age. Catherine de' Medici also, to whom some
female fortune-teller had predicted that all her sons should be kings,
hoped, after the election of her second son to the throne of Poland, to
find the full accomplishment of the prophecy in the advancement of the
youngest to the matrimonial crown of England. So serious was the belief
of that age in the lying oracles of judicial astrology!

Among the English travellers doomed to be eye-witnesses of the horrors
of the massacre of St. Bartholomew was the celebrated Philip Sidney,
then a youth of eighteen. He was the eldest son of sir Henry Sidney,
lord-deputy of Ireland, and from this excellent man and parent he had
received, amongst his earliest and strongest impressions, those elevated
principles of honor, veracity and moral purity which regulated and
adorned the whole tenor of his