accepted and practised faith or discipline, and without any eminent and recognized heads. The Reformation pursued its course; but a Reformed church did not exist. And this confused mass of Reformers and Reformed had to face an old, a powerful, and a strongly constituted church, which looked upon the innovators as rebels over whom it had every right as much as against them it had every arm. In each of the two camps prevailed errors of enormous magnitude, and fruitful of fatal consequences; Catholics and Protestants both believed themselves to be in exclusive possession of the truth, of all religious truth, and to have the right of imposing it by force upon their adversaries the moment they had the power. Both were strangers to any respect for human conscience, human thought, and human liberty. Those who had clamored for this on their own account when they were weak had no regard for it in respect of others when they felt themselves to be strong. On the side of the Protestants the ferment was at full heat, but as yet vague and unsettled; on the part of the Catholics the persecution was unscrupulous and unlimited. Such was the position and such the state of feeling in which Francis I., at his death on the 31st of March, 1547, left the two parties that had already been at grips during his reign. He had not succeeded either in reconciling them or in securing the triumph of that which had his favor and the defeat of that which he would have liked to vanquish. That was, in nearly all that he undertook, his fate; he lacked the spirit of sequence and steady persistence, and his merits as well as his defects almost equally urged him on to rashly attempt that which he only incompletely executed. He was neither prudent nor persevering, and he may be almost said to have laid himself out to please everybody rather than to succeed in one and the same great purpose. A short time before his death a Venetian ambassador who had resided a long while at his court, Marino Cavalli, drew up and forwarded to the Senate of Venice a portrait of him so observantly sketched and so full of truth that it must be placed here side by side with the more exacting and more severe judgment already pronounced here touching this brilliant but by no means far-sighted or effective king.