minded and sensible men. "The members of the House of
Bourbon," said he, "pretend that by right of blood the crown belongs to
them, and hence is derived the pretension made by the Prince of Bearne;
but if there were wanting other very sufficient causes to prevent this
claim--which however are not wanting--it is quite enough that he is a
relapsed heretic, declared to be such by the Apostolic See, and
pronounced incompetent, as well as the other members of his house, all of
them, to say the least, encouragers of heresy; so that not one of them
can ever be king of France, where there have been such religious princes
in time past, who have justly merited the name of Most Christian; and so
there is no possibility of permitting him or any of his house to aspire
to the throne, or to have the subject even treated of in the estates. It
should on the contrary be entirely excluded as prejudicial 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