qualities.

It must be confessed, however, that if the world had waited for heroes--
during the dreary period which followed the expulsion of something that
was called Henry III. of France from the gates of his capital, and
especially during the time that followed hard upon the decease of that
embodiment of royalty--its axis must have ceased to turn for a long
succession of years. The Bearnese was at least alive, and a man. He
played his part with consummate audacity and skill; but alas for an epoch
or a country in which such a shape--notwithstanding all its engaging and
even commanding qualities--looked upon as an incarnation of human
greatness!

But the chief mover of all things--so far as one man can be prime mover--
was still the diligent scribe who lived in the Escorial. It was he whose
high mission it was to blow the bellows of civil war, and to scatter
curses over what had once been the smiling abodes of human creatures,
throughout the leading countries of Christendom. The throne of France
was vacant, nominally as well as actually, since--the year 1589. During
two-and-twenty years preceding that epoch he had scourged the provinces,
once constituting the richest and most enlightened portions of his
hereditary domains, upon the theory that without the Spanish Inquisition
no material prosperity was possible on earth, nor any entrance permitted
to the realms of bliss beyond the grave. Had every Netherlander
consented to burn his Bible, and to be burned himself should he be found
listening to its holy precepts if read to him in shop, cottage, farm-
house, or castle; and had he furthermore consented to renounce all the
liberal institutions which his ancestors had earned, in the struggle of
centuries, by the sweat of their brows and the blood of, their hearts;
his benignant proprietor and master, who lived at the ends of the earth,