e dark genius of the family who once tolled funeral
knells in the ears of the first Bourbon, I meant, of course, the first
who sat upon the throne of France, viz., Henri Quatre. The allusion is
to the last hours of Henry's life, to the remarkable prophecies which
foreran his death, to their remarkable fulfilment, and (what is more
remarkable than all beside) to his self-surrender, in the spirit of an
unresisting victim, to a bloody fate which he regarded as inexorably
doomed. This king was not the good prince whom the French hold out to
us; not even the accomplished, the chivalrous, the elevated prince to
whom history points for one of her models. French and ultra-French must
have been the ideal of the good or the noble to which he could have
approximated in the estimate of the most thoughtless. He had that sort
of military courage which was, and is, more common than weeds. In all
else he was a low-minded man, vulgar in his thoughts, most unprincely in
his habits. He was even worse than that: wicked, brutal, sensually
cruel. And his wicked minister, Sully, than whom a more servile mind
never existed, illustrates in one passage his own character and his
master's by the apology which he offers for Henry's having notoriously
left many illegitimate children to perish of hunger, together with their
too-confiding mothers. What? That in the pressure of business he really
forgot them. Famine mocked at last the deadliest offence. His own
innocent children, up and down France, because they were illegitimate,
their too-confiding mothers, because they were weak and friendless by
having for his sake forfeited the favour of God and man, this amiable
king had left to perish of hunger. They _did_ perish; mother and infant.
A cry ascended against the king. Even in sensual France such atrocities
could not utterly sink to the ground. But what says the apologetic
minister? Astonished that anybody could think of abridging a king's
license in such particulars, he brushes away the whole charge as so much
ungentlemanly impertinence, disdaining any further plea than the
pressure of business, which so naturally accounted for the royal
inattention or forgetfulness in these little affairs. Observe that this
pressure of business never was such that the king could not find time
for pursuing these intrigues and multiplying these reversions of woe.
What enormities! A king (at all times of Navarre, and for half his life
of France) suffers his children to