extinguisher of all political conflagrations, away from affairs and
to seek the solace of along holiday in Scotland. His counsellors
persistently and vehemently implored him to defer that journey until
the following year at least, all the neighbouring nations being now in
a state of war and civil commotion. But it was in vain. He refused to
listen to them for a moment, and started for Scotland before the middle
of March.

Conde, who had kept France in a turmoil, had sought aid alternately from
the Calvinists at Grenoble and the Jesuits in Rome, from Spain and from
the Netherlands, from the Pope and from Maurice of Nassau, had thus been
caged at last. But there was little gained. There was one troublesome
but incompetent rebel the less, but there was no king in the land. He
who doubts the influence of the individual upon the fate of a country
and upon his times through long passages of history may explain the
difference between France of 1609, with a martial king aided by great
statesmen at its head, with an exchequer overflowing with revenue hoarded
for a great cause--and that cause an attempt at least to pacificate
Christendom and avert a universal and almost infinite conflict now
already opening--and the France of 1617, with its treasures already
squandered among ignoble and ruffianly favourites, with every office in
state, church, court, and magistracy sold to the highest bidder, with
a queen governed by an Italian adventurer who was governed by Spain,
and with a little king who had but lately expressed triumph at his
confirmation because now he should no longer be whipped, and who was just
married to a daughter of the hereditary and inevitable foe of France.

To contemplate this dreary interlude in the history of a powerful state
is to shiver at the depths of inanity and crime to which mankind can at
once descend. What need to pursue the barren, vulgar, and often repeated