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die of hunger, consigns their mothers to the same fate, but aggravated by remorse and by the spectacle of their perishing infants! These clamours could not penetrate to the Louvre, but they penetrated to a higher court, and were written in books from which there is no erasure allowed. So much for the vaunted 'generosity' of Henry IV. As to another feature of the chivalrous character, elegance of manners, let the reader consult the report of an English ambassador, a man of honour and a gentleman, Sir George Carew. It was published about the middle of the last century by the indefatigable Birch, to whom our historic literature is so much indebted, and it proves sufficiently that this idol of Frenchmen allowed himself in habits so coarse as to disgust the most creeping of his own courtiers; such that even the blackguards of a manly nation would revolt from them as foul and self-dishonouring. Deep and permanent is the mischief wrought in a nation by false models; and corresponding is the impression, immortal the benefit, from good ones. The English people have been the better for their Alfred, that pathetic ideal of a good king, through a space of now nearly a thousand years. The French are the worse to this hour in consequence of Francis I. and Henry IV. And note this, that even the spurious merit of the two French models can be sustained only by disguises, by suppressions, by elaborate varnishings; whereas the English prince is offered to our admiration with a Scriptural simplicity and a Scriptural fidelity, not as some gay legend of romance, some Telemachus of Fenelon, but as one who had erred, suffered, and had been purified; as a shepherd that had gone astray, and saw that through his transgressions the flock also had been scattered. _XVII. ROME'S RECRUITS AND ENGLAND'S RECRUITS._ Two facts on which a sound estimate of the Roman corn-trade depends are these: first, the very important one, that it was not Rome in the sense of the Italian peninsula which relied upon foreign corn, but in the narrowest sense Rome the city; as respected what we now call Lombardy, Florence, Genoa, etc., Rome did not disturb the ancient agriculture. The other fact offers, perhaps, a still more important consideration. Rome was latterly a most populous city--we are disposed to agree with Lipsius, that it was four times as populous as most moderns esteem--most certainly it bore a higher ratio to the total Italy than any other capita
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