was going on throughout almost the whole of France, partly in the path of liberty, partly in that of concessions, partly in that of hardships, the work of the Reformation, too weak as yet and too disconnected to engage to any purpose in a struggle, but even now sufficiently wide-spread and strong to render abortive any attempt to strangle it. The defeat at Pavia and the captivity of Francis I. at Madrid placed the governing power for thirteen months in the hands of the most powerful foes of the Reformation, the regent Louise of Savoy and the chancellor Duprat. They used it unsparingly, with the harsh indifference of politicians who will have, at any price, peace within their dominions and submission to authority. It was under their regimen that there took place the first martyrdom decreed and executed in France upon a partisan of the Reformation for an act of aggression and offence against the Catholic church. John Leclerc, a wool-carder at Meaux, seeing a bull of indulgences affixed to the door of Meaux cathedral, had torn it down, and substituted for it a placard in which the pope was described as Antichrist. Having been arrested on the spot, he was, by decree of the Parliament of Paris, whipped publicly, three days consecutively, and branded on the forehead by the hangman in the presence of his mother, who cried, “Jesus Christ forever!” He was banished, and retired in July, 1525, to Metz; and there he was working at his trade when he heard that a solemn procession was to take place, next day, in the environs of the town. In his blind zeal he went and broke down the images at the feet of which the Catholics were to have burned incense. Being arrested on his return to the town, he, far from disavowing the deed, acknowledged it and gloried in it. He was sentenced to a horrible punishment; his right hand was cut off, his nose was torn out, pincers were applied to his arms, his nipples were plucked out, his head was confined in two circlets of red-hot iron, and, whilst he was still chanting, in a loud voice, this versicle from the cxvth Psalm,-- “Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands.”