public de leur culte que leur accordoit l'edit de
janvier, c'etoit un coup premedite que l'attaque du duc de Guise contre
une congregation de huguenots, composee, a ce qu'il assure, en partie de
ses vassaux, et qui se trouvoit la premiere sur son passage a peu de
distance de ses terres."

[41] It is extremely unfortunate that Mr. Froude should have based his
account of French affairs at this important point upon so inaccurate and
prejudiced a writer as Varillas. To be correct in his delineation of these
transactions was almost as important for his object, as to be correct in
the narration of purely English occurrences. If he desired to avoid the
labor, from which he might well wish to be excused, of mastering the great
accumulation of contemporary and original French authorities, he might
have resorted with propriety, as he has done in the case of the massacre
of St. Bartholomew's Day, to Henri Martin's noble history, or to the
history of Sismondi, not to speak of Soldan, Von Polenz, and a host of
others. Varillas wrote, about a century after the events he described, a
number of works of slender literary, and still slighter historical value.
His "Histoire de Charles IX." (Cologne, 1686)--the work which Mr. Froude
has but too often followed--begins with an adulatory dedication to Louis
XIV., the first sentence of which sufficiently reveals the author's
prepossessions: "Sire, it is impossible to write the history of Charles
IX. without beginning the panegyric of your Majesty." No wonder that Mr.
Froude's account of the massacre of Vassy (History of England, vii. 401,
402), derived solely from this source (Hist. de Charles IX., i. 126,
etc.), is as favorable to Guise as his most devoted partisan could have
desired. But where in the world--even in Varillas--did the English
historian ever find authority for the statement (vii. 402) that, in
consequence of the necessity felt by Guise for temporizing, a little later
"_the affair at Vassy was censured in a public decree_"? To have allowed
_that_ would have been for Guise to admit that he was guilty of murder,
and that his enemies had not slandered him when they styled him a "butcher
of the human race." The duke _never did_ make such an acknowledgment; on
the contrary, he asseverated his innocence in his last breath. What was
really done on the occasion referred to was to try to shift the
responsibility of the war from the shoulders of the papists to those of
the Huguenots, by pr