service of warriors and statesmen developed in the years that were past.
The gathered energies of ruined feudalism were wielded by a single hand.
The mysterious King, in his den in the Escorial, dreary and silent, and
bent like a scribe over his papers, was the type and the champion of
arbitrary power. More than the Pope himself, he was the head of
Catholicity. In doctrine and in deed, the inexorable bigotry of Madrid
was ever in advance of Rome.

Not so with France. She was full of life,--a discordant and struggling
vitality. Her monks and priests, unlike those of Spain, were rarely
either fanatics or bigots; yet not the less did they ply the rack and
the fagot, and howl for heretic blood. Their all was at stake: their
vast power, their bloated wealth, were wrapped up in the ancient faith.
Men were burned, and women buried alive. All was in vain. To the utmost
bounds of France, the leaven of the Reform was working. The Huguenots,
fugitives from torture and death, found an asylum at Geneva, their city
of refuge, gathering around Calvin, their great high-priest. Thence
intrepid colporteurs, their lives in their hands, bore the Bible and the
psalm-book to city, hamlet, and castle, to feed the rising flame. The
scattered churches, pressed by a common danger, began to organize. An
ecclesiastical republic spread its ramifications through France, and
grew underground to a vigorous life,--pacific at the outset, for the
great body of its members were the quiet bourgeoisie, by habit, as by
faith, averse to violence. Yet a potent fraction of the warlike noblesse
were also of the new faith; and above them all, preeminent in character
as in station, stood Gaspar de Coligny, Admiral of France.

The old palace of the Louvre, reared by the "Roi Chevalier" on the site
of those dreary feudal towers which of old had guarded the banks of the
Seine, held within its sculptured masonry the worthless brood of Valois.