fire-arms more easy, more regular, and more general among the nations.
For more than a hundred years the Spaniards were the very masters
of the art of war. Their power had begun to decline, but they still
retained their military superiority; and from the Battle of Ceresole,
won by the Count of Enghien in 1544, down to the memorable victory of
Rocroy, gained in 1643 by a hero of the same race and the same name,
they had the upper-hand in all pitched engagements. Their generals
were the very best and most thoroughly instructed, and formed a real
school; they, too, were the only officers who practised strategy.
Their organization was better than any other, and their celebrated
_tercios_ were the very model of all regiments. Their armament was
likewise superior, as they had adopted the musket, which was the
first fire-arm that a man could handle with any facility, load with
rapidity, and aim with any precision. Each of their _tercios_ or
battalions contained a regulated proportion of these musketeers, and
the number was large, compared to the whole mass of troops.

The excellent results attained by the Spaniards, in the more perfect
organization and equipment of their infantry, did not escape the
attention of the French officers; and one of them especially, the Duke
Francis de Guise, endeavored to turn his observations to good account.
It is to him that we are indebted for the first rough sketch of
regimental organization modelled upon that of the _tercios_, and, in
more than one encounter with the Huguenots, the numbers of thoroughly
skilled arquebuse-men embodied in the old French bands in Picardy and
Piedmont secured advantages to the Catholic armies. In the opposite
party, a young general who was destined to become a great king,
endowed with that creative instinct, that genius which is as readily
applicable to the science of government as to that of war, and which,
when tempered with good sense, may bestow glory and happiness upon
whole nations, Henry IV., had taken particular pains to increase the
number and the efficiency of his arquebuse-men, and frequently managed
to employ them in ways as novel as they were successful. At the Battle
of Coutras, he distributed them in groups of twenty-five, in the midst
of his squadrons of cavalry, so that, when the royal _gendarmerie_
advanced to charge the latter, they were suddenly received with
murderous volleys by these arquebuse-men _of the spur_, as they were
called, owing