duke_
of Guise, young Claude of Lorraine had now attained the highest
position which a subject could occupy.

Years of conflagration, carnage, and woe rolled over war-deluged
Europe, during which all the energies of the human race seemed to be
expended in destruction; and in almost every scene of smouldering
cities, of ravaged valleys, of battle-fields rendered hideous with the
shouts of onset and shrieks of despair, we see the apparition of the
stalwart frame of Guise, scarred, and war-worn, and blackened with the
smoke and dust of the fray, riding upon his proud charger, wherever
peril was most imminent, as if his body were made of iron.

At one time he drove before him, in most bloody rout, a numerous army
of Germans. The fugitives, spreading over leagues of country, fled by
his own strong castle of Neufchateau. Antoinette and the ladies of her
court stood upon the battlements of the castle, gazing upon the scene,
to them so new and to them so pleasantly exciting. As they saw the
charges of the cavalry trampling the dead and the dying beneath their
feet, as they witnessed all the horrors of that most horrible scene
which earth can present--a victorious army cutting to pieces its
flying foes, with shouts of applause they animated the ardor of the
victors. The once fair-faced boy had now become a veteran. His bronzed
cheek and sinewy frame attested his life of hardship and toil. The
nobles were jealous of his power. The king was annoyed by his haughty
bearing; but he was the idol of the people. In one campaign he caused
the death of forty thousand Protestants, for he was the devoted
servant of mother Church. _Claude the Butcher_ was the not
inappropriate name by which the Protestants designated him. His
brother John attained the dignity of Cardinal of Lorraine. Claude with
his keen sword, and John with pomp, and pride, and spiritual power,
became the most relentless foes of the Reformation, and the most
valiant defenders of the Catholic faith.

The kind-heartedness of the wealthy but dissolute cardinal, and the
prodigality of his charity, rendered him almost as popular as his
warlike brother. When he went abroad, his _valet de chambre_
invariably prepared him a bag filled with gold, from which he gave to
the poor most freely. His reputation for charity was so exalted that
a poor blind mendicant, to whom he gave gold in the streets of Rome,
overjoyed at the acquisition of such a treasure, exclaimed, "Surely
thou art