edification, in the midst of the worst of the incessant tempests, her proposed epitaph which ran: “Ci-gist Margot, la gentile demoiselle Qu’eut deux maris, et ci mourut pucelle.” The epitaph was not needed, and Margaret reached Spain at last, where she was received with wild joy, at once becoming the idol of all who met her, from Queen Isabella down. The prince was of the same temper as herself, handsome, noble in character, learned, proficient in all the arts, and they were married the moment Lent was over, in the midst of a kind of frenzy of general joy and magnificence. This was on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1497; on October 4 the fairy prince was dead of the plague, dying as he had lived his brief life of nineteen years, a gentle and perfect knight, destroying the golden dreams of his people, breaking the heart of the Queen, and leaving Margaret, heartbroken also, to await the birth of her child, who was born only to die after a single breath. The life of the girl-widow was despaired of, but she finally recovered, and in spite of the prayers of the sorrowing Queen and court, who had acquired a passionate affection for her, returned to Flanders, where her brother Philip, through a sequence of deaths in the royal family of Spain, had suddenly found his wife the heir to the vast and powerful kingdom. Margaret arrived in 1499 and two years later, again for political reasons (her spirited father now being interested in the conquest of Italy), was married to Duke Philibert of Savoy, Philibert le Beau, a figure of splendour, courage, learning, and beneficence; devoted to his people, to governmental and industrial reform, to the founding of schools, hospitals, monasteries. One looks aghast on the mortality of young and promising leaders at this particular time. They arise like splendid stars, they embody all the beneficent quality of the five centuries of mediævalism that already had come to an end; they have no kinship with the new type of the Renaissance then first showing itself--with a Henry VIII, a Francis I, a Philip II, an Alexander VI--and one by one they are blotted out of the darkening heavens. Born out of due time, after the ending of an epoch of righteousness and beauty, they seem to be taken away from a world they could not save and that could only have been for them a misery and a disappointment, as it was for Margaret’s baby nephew, Charles, who was destined to inherit the world in its chaotic desolation only to surrender it at last and seek refuge in the cloister.