aesthetic culture; and filled with wild passions, wildly-dramatic
personalities, a scene already singularly attractive by its artistic
beauty. A heady religious fanaticism was worked by every prominent
egotist in turn, pondering on his chances, in the event of the
extinction of the house of Valois with the three sons of Catherine de
Medici, born unsound, and doomed by astrological prediction. The old
manors, which had exchanged their towers for summer-houses under the
softening influence of Renaissance fashions, found themselves once
more medievally insecure amid a vagrant warfare of foreign
mercenaries and armed peasants. It was a curiously refined people
who now took down the armour, hanging high on the wall for decoration
among newer things so little warlike.

A difficult age, certainly, for scrupulous spirits to move in! A
perplexed network of partizan or personal interests underlay, and
furnished the really directing forces in, a supposed Armageddon of
contending religious convictions. The wisest perhaps, like Michel de
L'Hopital, withdrew themselves from a conflict, in which not a single
actor has the air of quite pure intentions; while religion, itself
the assumed ground of quarrel, seems appreciable all the while only
by abstraction from the parties, the leaders, at once violent [17]
and cunning, who are most pretentious in the assertion of its rival
claims. What there was of religion was in hiding, perhaps, with the
so-called "Political" party, professedly almost indifferent to it,
but which had at least something of humanity on its side, and some
chance of that placidity of mind in which alone the business of the
spirit can be done. The new sect of "Papists" were not the true
catholics: there was little of the virtue of the martyr in militant
Calvinism. It is not a catholic historian who notes with profound
regret "that inauspicious day," in the year 1562, Gaston's tenth