We see at once a man of moderate stature, light, sinewy, and strong; a face browned with continual exposure; small, mirthful, yet commanding blue eyes, glittering from beneath an arching brow, and prominent cheek-bones; a long, hawk’s nose, almost resting upon a salient chin; a pendent mustache, and a thick, brown, curly beard, prematurely grizzled; we see the mien of frank authority and magnificent good-humor; we hear the ready sallies of the shrewd Gascon mother-wit; we feel the electricity which flashes out of him and sets all hearts around him on fire, when the trumpet sounds to battle. The headlong, desperate charge, the snow-white plume waving where the fire is hottest, the large capacity for enjoyment of the man, rioting without affectation in the _certaminis gaudia_, the insane gallop, after the combat, to lay its trophies at the feet of the Cynthia of the minute, and thus to forfeit its fruits--all are as familiar to us as if the seven distinct wars, the hundred pitched battles, the two hundred sieges, in which the Bearnese was personally present, had been occurrences of our own day. He at last was both king and man, if the monarch who occupied the throne was neither. He was the man to prove, too, for the instruction of the patient letter-writer of the Escorial,[24] that the crown of France was to be won with foot in stirrup and carbine in hand, rather than to be caught by the weaving and casting of the most intricate nets of diplomatic intrigue, though thoroughly weighted with Mexican gold. The king of Navarre was now thirty-one years old; for the three Henrys were nearly of the same age. The first indications of his existence had been recognized amid the cannon and trumpets of a camp in Picardy, and his mother had sung a gay Bearnese song as he was coming into the world at Pau. “Thus,” said his grandfather, Henry of Navarre, “thou shalt not bear to us a morose and sulky child.” The good king without a kingdom, taking the child as soon as born in the lappel of his dressing-gown, had brushed his infant lips with a clove of garlic and moistened them with a drop of generous Gascon wine. “Thus,” said the grandfather again, “shall the boy be both merry and bold.” There was something mythologically prophetic in the incidents of his birth. The best part of Navarre had been long since appropriated by Ferdinand of Aragon. In France there reigned a young and warlike sovereign with four healthy boys. But the newborn infant had inherited the lilies of France from St. Louis, and a later ancestor had added to the escutcheon the motto “_Espoir_.” His grandfather believed that the boy was born to revenge upon Spain the wrongs of the house of Albret, and Henry’s nature seemed ever pervaded with Robert of Clermont’s device.