reign of Louis XII. to observe, that in common with the princes of that age, he suffered himself to be misled by a phantom of ambition. The brilliant but unfortunate career of his predecessor, together with his pretensions on the Duchy of Milan, through his grandmother Visconti, and a prospect of the crown of Naples, allured him into Italy, where after marching unprofitably over the country, with victory in his van, and disaster in his rear; after wasting the treasures of his kingdom, and the blood of much of his brave nobility, he committed (without securing the affections of the Italians,) the capital error of ruining the weak, and augmenting the power of the strong, so that, like many other conquerors, he ended pretty nearly where he began. The great folly of kings has ever been, the belief that the true art of government consists in enlarging the extent of their dominions, and not as it really does in the invigoration and embellishment of those they already possess. Few princes have patience and generosity enough to labour for posterity. The visions. of vanity, and the schemes of self love, are for the most part the directors of their policy; and therefore they act like tenants on short leases, who force their lands to the utmost, and provided they can gather a tolerable crop themselves, feel no regret for the ruin of the land, nor anxiety for the fortunes of those who are to follow them.

It is one of the principal inconveniences of the monarchical form of government, that it not only renders the moral character of a nation dependent in a great degree on the personal character of the sovereign, but exposes the sovereign more than any other individual in his dominions to corruption, from the circumstance of his being born to power, and of course surrounded with parasites from his infancy. It is perhaps owing to this cause that the greatest and best kings of France have been those who were not born with a certain prospect of wearing the crown, but came into possession of it by accident, after having learned wisdom in the school of adversity. Louis XII., Francis I., Henry IV., and Louis XVIII., might be cited as examples in support of this suggestion. Francis I. it is true, had his reason staggered by a too sudden dash of prosperity, and his morals injured by the too early enjoyment of regal power; yet he was a prince of distinguished talents, and his reign, which lasted from 1515 to near

the middle of the sixteenth century, had a great influence in forming the French character. Perhaps, however, the indiscretions and the adventurous knight-errantry of Francis, were fortunate for mankind, since the destinies of Europe probably hung at one time on his religious caprice. The encroachments and practices of the papal see had excited considerable discontent in France at the time that Luther unveiled the sun of reformation; so that if Francis, whilst its rays were spreading over Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and England, had nursed the resourses of his kingdom, and embraced with moderation the side of the Huguenots, he must have become the head of the Protestant league, and in the end of his reign, the most powerful potentate in Europe. A kingdom so extensive and centrally situated as France, invigorated and enriched as it must have been by a few years of peace, would have become, in alliance with Protestant Germany and England, an over-match for the Empire and Spain, so that Francis, instead of wasting his energies in the victories of Marignan and Cerisoles, or losing every thing "except honor" on the fields of Bicoque and Pavia, might have not only acquired the ascendency in Europe, but have drawn a sword, which, in the hands of one of his successors, might have cut the gordian knot of universal conquest. But this prince was born with a temperament too sanguine to perceive the obstacles that might impede the course of his own hot ambition, and he therefore plunged presumptuously into a sea of experiment, and after a variety of heroical adventures, ended his voyage less happily than he began it. The fondness of Francis for martial and courtly gallantry, fascinated the regards, and embellished the character of the French nation; but the best fruits of a wise administration ripen in after times, and although it may not be fair to put "all upon the king," it is just to lay something to his charge.

✔ Under Francis I. the effects of the art of printing began to be very sensibly felt; a thirst for learning made its appearance, and a taste for the fine arts began to quicken and expand itself. The observations of that monarch in Italy had enlarged in his mind the views of liberal curiosity, and led him to invite to his court some of the most respectable artists that flourished at that time under the Italian republics. But the age was essentially barba

rous, and history furnishes us with ample proof, that when the heats of religious controversy broke out, a spirit of ferocity prevailed in the French nation, that led (in contempt of justice, and the dictates of moral sentiment,) to the most monstrous inhumanities. The numberless victims that were consigned for their speculative opinions to the rack and the flames; the desolation of the Vaudois, and the massacre of its entire population; the tearing to pieces of Jean le Clerc with red hot pincers, for having spoken against images and relics, and a variety of other atrocities, justify the observation of Voltaire, that when the bishops and the parliament lighted funeral piles, the king did not extinguish them, because his heart was as much hardened to the misfortunes of others, as it was softened by his own pleasures. These assassinations were the commencement of that cloud of persecution which hung over France during the latter half of the sixteenth century, and rendered it one of the most dismal periods in the history of man; "a period, the contemplation whereof," says John de Serre, a contemporary author, "makes my hair to stand upright, and my heart to tremble."*

Henry II. did the Huguenots too much injury not to fear them; and from the moment he feared, he wished to exterminate them. The parliament, however, remembered that the first martyrs of christianity had made converts by blessing the hands of their executioners, and it was therefore disposed to toleration; but the atrocious house of Guise had then become so powerful, that by intimidating the weak minded, bribing the corrupt, and inflaming the passions of the resentful, they not only succeeded in dispelling from that body the sweet spirit of mercy and conciliation which had begun to prevail in it, but in substituting in its place a sourness of temper, and a spirit of vindictive persecution, which not even the virtues of an Hopital could afterwards extinguish or abate. Under the influence of this passion, the voice of all France became attuned to threnes of sadness, or to the tumultuous and cannibal cry of ferocious joy. The morals of an amiable, though half barbarous people, soon became so brutalized by executions and massacres, that if it were not for the light which a few such shooting stars as Hopital and

* History of France, p. 697, fol. ed. London, 1611.

Coligny shed on that gloomy age, we might imagine that for a period of twenty or thirty years, a night of universal ignominy had shut in on this bright realm of France, and that a rain of divine vengeance deluged it.

During the domination of Catharine of Medicis, and the house of Guise, under the reigns of Henry II., Francis II., Charles IX., and Henry III., which nearly closed the sixteenth century, the French historians assert, that religion became a mere sanguinary worship, whilst wealth and honours were lavished only on those who were accomplished in the obliquities of perfidy; that the fine arts falling into neglect, lost the charm which for a time they had acquired over the minds of the nobles, and that literature, suffocated by oppression, enriched the language with nothing but "the expressions of malice and revenge."* The martial sternness of chivalry, which was manly, if not humane, gave way to a finical hypocrisy, so that from that day the consciences of French courtiers became jocund under the pressure of vice, and gay in the midst of crime. Under Charles, the nobility took lessons in the exercise of the dagger, and the practice of an empoisoner or a hireling assassin, was so respectable that the place of their abode was a matter of public notoriety. Nor can posterity easily forget that it was under the government of Catharine of Medicis, that the amiable and beautiful Queen of Scots, just then in the bloom of youth and adolescence, was conducted with the court into a balcony at Amboise to enjoy the luxury of public executions; nay, to be derided with laughter, because, unfamiliarized with blood, she could not behold a spectacle of horror without affliction. To form an idea of the morals of the court, (says Millot,† who wrote under Louis XV.) it is only necessary to conceive all sorts of vice carried to the greatest possible excess; superstition, atheism, debauchery, hypocrisy, cruelty, poisoning, and assassination, were the praiseworthy accomplishments of the day. Every one acted in such seeming ignorance of the principles of right and wrong, and such contempt of justice, that private morals became as atrocious as they were depraved. The whim of a priest might exalt into virtue acts which the christian revelation had

* History des Guerres civiles, 2 vol. p. 394.

History of France.

denounced as crimes; and the caprice of a mistress justify the murder of a friend!

Although the seeds of moral principle which these bad times. sowed, were never fairly eradicated out of France, I would not tire your patience by recalling your attention to the dismal events* of a period in which, "on parlait d'une contagion, d'une famine comme en d'autres temps on aurait parlé d'un accident leger," if there was not a striking coincidence between them and the principal atrocities of the late revolution. It was at the close of the 16th century, that the good people of Paris benevolently murdered, for the safety of his soul, any person who, in passing through the streets, omitted a reverence to the innumerable crosses, and images of saints and madonnas, or who might even refuse a contribution to replenish the lamps which burnt before them; at the elose of the 18th the populace of Paris massacred every one they suspected of entertaining respect for such images. It was then that Charles IX. could offer up in a single day one hundred thousand human sacrifices, on what his hellish imagination conceived to be the altar of the Lamb of God; it was now that Robespierre would immolate an equal number of victims, in what his soul of malignity fancied to be the temple of liberty and peace. The devastation of the peaceful dwellings of the Vaudois, in the vallies of Provence and Dauphiny, by D'Oppéde, was the 'model of the La Vendée war-the drownings in the Loire were conducted on nearly the same plan by the Guises, as the revolutionary marriages of Nantes by Carrier-the inscription over the door of Joseph Le Bon's tribunal at Arras, that whoever came to plead for those confined on "a suspicion of being suspected, should be led to the little window," (the guillotine,) was copied nearly after that of Cardinal Lorraine at Fontainbleau, when he erected a gallows, and proclaimed by trumpet, that all who came to solicit mercy

*The butcheries in Bordeaux, Guienne, L'Angoumois, La Marche, and St. Onge, by Montmorenci, nnder Henri II.; the drownings in the Loire, and the hangings at Amboise until the air was infected, by Car. Lorraine under Francis II. the flagellations and hangings by Montlue and Guise under Catharine of Medicis, and that climax of human villany, the night of St. Barthelemy under Charles IX. "Nous avons vu," says Volaire, les juges d'Angleterre sous Henri VIII. et sous Marie exercer des cruautés qui font horreur; les Français qui passent pour un peuple plus doux surpasserent beaucoup ces barbaries faites au nom de la religion et de la justice." Vol xviii. p. 228.