to the realm
and unworthy to be even mentioned among persons so Catholic as those
about to meet in that assembly."

The claims of the man whom his supporters already called Henry the Fourth
of France being thus disposed of, Philip then again alluded with his
usual minuteness to the various combinations which he had formed for the
tranquillity and good government of that kingdom and of the other
provinces of his world-empire.

It must moreover be never forgotten that what he said passed with his
contemporaries almost for oracular dispensations. What he did or ordered
to be done was like the achievements or behests of a superhuman being.
Time, as it rolls by, leaves the wrecks of many a stranded reputation to
bleach in the sunshine of after-ages. It is sometimes as profitable to
learn what was not done by the great ones of the earth, in spite of all
their efforts, as to ponder those actual deeds which are patent to
mankind. The Past was once the Present, and once the Future, bright with
rainbows or black with impending storm; for history is a continuous whole
of which we see only fragments.

He who at the epoch with which we are now occupied was deemed greatest
and wisest among the sons of earth, at whose threats men quailed, at
whose vast and intricate schemes men gasped in palefaced awe, has left
behind him the record of his interior being. Let us consider whether he
was so potent as his fellow mortals believed, or whether his greatness
was merely their littleness; whether it was carved out, of the
inexhaustible but artificial quarry of human degradation. Let us see
whether the execution was consonant with the inordinate plotting; whether
the price in money and blood--and certainly few human beings have
squandered so much of either as did Philip the Prudent in his long
career--was high or low for the work achieved.

Were after generations to learn, only after curious research, of a
pretender who once called himself, to the amusement of his
contemporaries, Henry the Fourth of France; or was the world-empire for
which so many armies were marshalled, so many ducats expended, so many
falsehoods told, to prove a bubble after all? Time was to show. Meantime
wise men of the day who, like the sages of every generation, read the
future like a printed scroll, were pitying the delusion and rebuking the
wickedness of Henry the Bearnese; persisting as he did in his cruel,
sanguinary, hopeless attempt to establish a vanished and