savage deeds, at which, when recounted in the pages of history, all subsequent ages shudder. Even the massacre of St Bartholomew, perhaps the most atrocious, because the most cold-blooded and perfidious, of all those horrid deeds, excited at the time no feeling of indignation in the Roman Catholic party throughout Europe. On the Contrary, it was universally and cordially approved of by those of that persuasion in every country, as a most effectual and expedient, and withal justifiable way of lopping off a gangrened arm from the body politic, and extinguishing a pestilent heresy. The discharges of the cannon from the castle of St Angelo, and the _Te Deum_ sung in St Peter's, on the arrival of the glorious intelligence, by the Head of the faithful at Rome, were re-echoed by the acclamation--without, so far as appears, a single exception--of the whole Romish world.[19] It was the cessation of the hideous scenes of bloodshed and massacre which had signalised the civil wars in the reigns of the Valois princes, and the religious dissensions that succeeded them, which gave Henry IV. his great and deserved reputation. Like Napoleon, he calmed, by his acquisition of the throne, the passions of a nation in arms against itself. The hereditary feuds, the dreadful retaliations, the mutual proscriptions, the fierce passions, the frightful revenge of the feudal and Huguenot wars, were stilled as if by the wand of a mighty enchanter. Henry IV. was the man of his age; and hence it was that he achieved this prodigy. His mental and physical qualities were precisely those which his time demanded; and it was this combination which enabled him to achieve his astonishing success. Bold, active, and enterprising, he presented that mixture of warlike virtues with chivalrous graces which it is the great object of romance to portray, and which may be said to form the ideal of the European character. He possessed that individual gallantry, that personal daring, that spontaneous generosity, which, even more than commanding intellectual qualities, succeed in winning the hearts of mankind. Ever the foremost in attack, the last in retreat, he excelled his boldest knights in personal courage. The battle-field was to him a scene of exultation. He had the true heroic character. Like the youth in Tacitus, he loved danger itself, not the rewards of valour. Nor were the mental qualities and combinations requisite in the general awanting. On the contrary, he possessed them in the very highest degree. Active, enterprising, indefatigable, he was ever in the field with the advanced guard, and often ran the greatest personal danger from his anxiety to see with his own eyes the position or forces of the enemy. His skill in partisan strife, on which so much of success in war then depended--in the surprise of castles, the siege of towns, the capture of convoys, the sudden irruption into territories, equalled all that poetry had conceived of the marvellous.