ng a civil
war, to check the necessary progress of your well-concerted designs. But
on the day of the barricades you most imprudently let the king escape out
of Paris, when you might have slain or deposed him. This was directly
against the great rule of my politics, not to stop short in rebellion or
treason till the work is fully completed. And you were justly censured
for it by Pope Sixtus Quintus, a more consummate politician, who said,
"You ought to have known that when a subject draws his sword against his
king he should throw away the scabbard." You likewise deviated from my
counsels, by putting yourself in the power of a sovereign you had so much
offended. Why would you, against all the cautions I had given, expose
your life in a loyal castle to the mercy of that prince? You trusted to
his fear, but fear, insulted and desperate, is often cruel. Impute
therefore your death not to any fault in my maxims, but to your own folly
in not having sufficiently observed them.

_Guise_.--If neither I nor that prince had ever practised your maxims in
any part of our conduct, he would have reigned many years with honour and
peace, and I should have risen by my courage and talents to as high a
pitch of greatness as it consisted with the duty of a subject to desire.
But your instructions led us on into those crooked paths, out of which
there was no retreat without great danger, nor a possibility of advancing
without being detested by all mankind, and whoever is so has everything
to fear from that detestation. I will give you a proof of this in the
fate of a prince, who ought to have been your hero instead of Caesar
Borgia, because he was incomparably a greater man, and, of all who ever
lived, seems to have acted most steadily according to the rules laid down
by you; I mean Richard III., King of England. He stopped at no crime
that could be profitable to him; he was a dissembler, a hypocrite, a
murderer in cool blood. After the death of his brother he gained the
crown by cutting off, without pity, all who stood in his way. He trusted
no man any further than helped his own purposes and consisted with his
own safety. He liberally rewarded all services done him, but would not
let the remembrance of them atone for offences or save any man from
destruction who obstructed his views. Nevertheless, though his nature
shrunk from no wickedness which could serve his ambition, he possessed
and exercised all those virtues which you