urged the prisoner to give it up. “A second sentence,” said he, “is ready, and it pronounces death. If you acquiesce in the first, we shall be able to save you later on. All that is demanded of you is to ask pardon: and have we not all need of pardon?” It appears that for a moment Berquin hesitated, and was on the point of consenting; but Bude remained anxious. “I know him,” said he; “his ingenuousness and his confidence in the goodness of his cause will ruin him.” The king was at Blois, and his sister Marguerite at St. Germain; on the news of this urgent peril she wrote to her brother, “I for the last time, make you a very humble request; it is, that you will be pleased to have pity upon poor Berquin, whom I know to be suffering for nothing but loving the word of God and obeying yours. You will be pleased, Monseigneur, so to act that it be not said that separation has made you forget your most humble and most obedient subject and sister, Marguerite.” We can discover no trace of any reply whatever from Francis I. According to most of the documentary evidence, uncertainty lasted for three days. Berquin persisted in his resolution. “No,” he to his friend Bude, who again came to the prison, “I would rather endure death than give my approval, even by silence only to condemnation of the truth.” The president of the court went once more to pay him a visit, and asked him if he held to his appeal. Berquin said, “Yes.” court revised its original sentence, and for the penalty of perpetual imprisonment substituted that of the stake. On the 22d of April, 1529, according to most of the documents, but on the 17th, according to the _Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris,_ which the details of the last days render highly improbable, the officers of Parliament entered Berquin’s gloomy chamber. He rose quietly and went with them; the procession set out, and at about three arrived at the Place de Greve; where the stake was ready. “Berquin had a gown of velvet, garments of satin and damask, and hosen of gold thread,” says the Bourgeois de Paris. “‘Alas!’ said some as they saw him pass, ‘he is of noble lineage, a mighty great scholar, expert in science and subtile withal, and nevertheless he hath gone out of his senses.’” We borrow the account of his actual death from a letter of Erasmus, written on the evidence of an eye-witness: “Not a symptom of agitation appeared either in his face or the attitude of his body: he had the bearing of a man who is meditating in his cabinet on the subject of his studies, or in a temple on the affairs of heaven. Even when the executioner, in a rough voice, proclaimed his crime and its penalty, the constant serenity of his features was not at all altered. When the order was given him to dismount from the tumbrel, he obeyed cheerfully without hesitating; nevertheless he had not about him any of that audacity, that arrogance, which in the case of malefactors is sometimes bred of their natural