o him, were now willing to accept the sovereignty of a thing
like Henry of Valois.

He had not been born without natural gifts, such as Heaven rarely denies
to prince or peasant; but the courage which he once possessed had been
exhausted on the field of Moncontour, his manhood had been left behind
him at Venice, and such wit as Heaven had endowed him withal was now
expended in darting viperous epigrams at court-ladies whom he was only
capable of dishonouring by calumny, and whose charms he burned to
outrival in the estimation of his minions. For the monarch of France was
not unfrequently pleased to attire himself like a woman and a harlot.
With silken flounces, jewelled stomacher, and painted face, with pearls
of great price adorning his bared neck and breast, and satin-slippered
feet, of whose delicate shape and size he was justly vain, it was his
delight to pass his days and nights in a ceaseless round of gorgeous
festivals, tourneys, processions; masquerades, banquets, and balls, the
cost of which glittering frivolities caused the popular burthen and the
popular execration to grow, from day to day, more intolerable and more
audible. Surrounded by a gang of "minions," the most debauched and the
most desperate of France, whose bedizened dresses exhaled perfumes
throughout Paris, and whose sanguinary encounters dyed every street in
blood, Henry lived a life of what he called pleasure, careless of what
might come after, for he was the last of his race. The fortunes of his
minions rose higher and higher, as their crimes rendered them more and
more estimable in the eyes of a King who took a woman's pride in the
valour of such champions to his weakness, and more odious to a people
whose miserable homes were made even more miserable, that the coffers of
a few court-favourites might be filled: Now sauntering, full-dressed, in
the public promenades, with ghastly little death's heads strung upon his
sumptuous garments, and fragments of human bones dangling among his
orders of knighthood--playing at cup and ball as he walked, and followed
by a few select courtiers who gravely pursued the same exciting
occupation--now presiding like a queen of beauty at a tournament to
assign the prize of valour, and now, by the advice of his mother, going
about the streets in robes of penitence, telling his beads as he went,
that the populace might be edified by his piety, and solemnly offering up
prayers in the churches that the blessing of an h