"We learn that he was at this time a very lively, quick, and beautiful boy, full of vigour and activity of mind and body, apt to receive instruction, and giving every promise of attaining great proficiency in letters. La Gaucherie took every pains to render the study of the learned languages agreeable to him; not teaching him in the ordinary method, by filling his mind with long and laborious rules, difficult to remember, and still more difficult to apply, but following more the common course by which we acquire our maternal language; and storing his mind with a number of Greek and Latin sentences, which the Prince afterwards wrote down and analysed. The first work which he seems to have translated regularly was Cæsar's Commentaries; a version of several books of which was seen by the biographer of the Duke of Nevers in his own handwriting; and his familiarity with the Greek was frequently shown in the sports and pastimes of the court where mottoes in the learned languages were frequently required. "It is customary for the historians and eulogists of great men to point out, after their acts have rendered them famous those slight indications which sometimes in youth give promise of future eminence; and thus, we are told the favourite motto, of Henry in his boyhood was, [Greek: ê nikan ê apothanein], to conquer or to die. The fact, however, is worthy of remark, not so much perhaps because it showed the boy's aspirations for military glory, as because his frequent use of this sentence seems to have created some uneasiness in the mind of Catherine de Medicis, who forbade his masters to teach him such apophthegms for the future, saying that they were only calculated to render him obstinate.