endeavouring to subdue, it soon appeared that he was still as far from the conquest of either as ever. King David was liberated by a treaty concluded in 1357; and in 1360 peace was made with France by the treaty of Bretigny, in which Edward renounced his claim both to the French crown and to the possession of Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, on condition of being acknowledged the full sovereign of Guienne, Poitou, and Ponthieu. This treaty set King John at liberty; but three years after, on finding himself unable to pay the instalments due upon the sum that had been agreed upon for his ransom--three million gold crowns--he honourably returned to his imprisonment; and he died in England, in the palace of the Savoy, London, in the beginning of April, 1364. His eldest son immediately mounted the throne of France as Charles V. Charles, from the commencement of his reign, had betrayed a disposition to extricate himself as soon as an opportunity should occur from the obligations of the treaty of Bretigny, the renunciations stipulated by which had never, in fact, been actually made on either side. Meanwhile the course of circumstances favoured his views. The King of England was no longer the man he had been either in ardour or in energy; his heroic son had also fallen into ill health, the effect of exposure in an expedition, to be lamented on every account, which he had made in the winter of 1366-7 into Spain, to assist Pedro the Cruel in his contest for the throne of Castile with his illegitimate brother Enrique; and much disaffection had been excited both in Poitou and Guienne by the severe exactions of the English government, rendered necessary by the expenses of this expedition, and by the debts incurred in the late war. In the beginning of the year 1369 Charles openly took his ground by summoning the Black Prince, as Duke of Aquitaine, to appear in his court as a vassal, and answer the complaints of the people of that duchy. The most memorable event of the short war that followed was the sad and atrocious massacre by the English prince of the inhabitants of Limoges, the capital of his country of the Limosin, after he had recovered the town, which had a short time previously been taken by, or had given itself up to, the French general, the Duke of Berri. "It was great pity," says Froissart, "to see the men, women, and children that kneeled down on their knees before the prince for mercy, but he was so inflamed with ire that he took no heed to them, so that none was heard, but all put to death as they were met withal, and such as were nothing culpable: there was no pity taken of the poor people, who wrought never no manner of treason, yet they bought it dearer than the great personages, such as had done the evil and trespass. There was not so hard a heart within the city of Limoges, an if he had any remembrance of God, but that wept piteously for the great mischief that they saw before their eyen; for mo than