murder of Antonio Perez.

In England, where he was supported by the generosity of Essex, he did
not remain very long, having been recalled, in 1594, to France by Henry,
who had recently declared war against Philip. At Paris, Perez was
received with great distinction and the most flattering attentions,
being lodged in a spacious mansion, and provided with a military
body-guard. The precaution was not superfluous. Wearing seemingly a
charmed life, the dusky spectre of premature and unnatural death haunted
him wherever he went or sojourned. Baron Pinilla, a Spaniard, was
captured in Paris on the eve of his attempt to murder Perez, put to the
torture, and executed on the Place de Greve--thus adding another name to
the long catalogue of people, to whom any connexion with, or implication
in, the affairs of Perez, whether innocently or criminally, for good or
evil, attracted, it might be imagined as by Lady Bacon, from an angry
Heaven the flash of calamitous ruin.

His present prosperity came as a brilliant glimpse through hopeless
darkness, and so departed. Revisiting England in 1596, he found himself
denied access to Essex, shunned by the Bacons, and disregarded by every
body. The consequent mortification accelerated his return to France,
which he reached, as Henry was concluding peace with Philip, to
encounter cold distrust and speedy neglect from the French King. All
this was the result of his own incurable double-dealing. He had been
Henry's spy in the court of Elizabeth, and was, or fancied himself to be
Elizabeth's at Paris. But the omnipotent secretary of state and the
needy adventurer played the game of duplicity and perfidy with the odds
reversed. All parties, as their experience unmasked his hollow
insincerity, shrunk from reliance on, or intercourse with an
ambidextrous knave, to whom mischief and deceit were infinitely more
congenial than wisdom and honesty. "The truth is," wrote Villeroy, one
of the French ministers, to a correspondent in 1605, "that his
adversities have not made him much wiser or more discreet than he was in
his prosperity." We must confess ourselves unable to perceive any traces
of even the qualified improvement admitted by Villeroy.

The rest of the biography of this extraordinary man is a miserable diary
of indignant lamentations over his abject condition--of impudent
laudations of the blameless integrity of his career--of grovelling and
ineffectual efforts and supplications to appease and