his company through the outskirts of Vassy, where they were apparently worshipping in the open air! Of course they were the aggressors. [40] And yet there is great force in M. Sismondi's observation (Hist. des Francais, xviii. 264): "Malgre leur assertion, il est difficile de ne pas croire qu'au moment ou ils se reunissoient en armes pour disputer aux protestans l'exercise public de leur culte que leur accordoit l'edit de janvier, c'etoit un coup premedite que l'attaque du duc de Guise contre une congregation de huguenots, composee, a ce qu'il assure, en partie de ses vassaux, et qui se trouvoit la premiere sur son passage a peu de distance de ses terres." [41] It is extremely unfortunate that Mr. Froude should have based his account of French affairs at this important point upon so inaccurate and prejudiced a writer as Varillas. To be correct in his delineation of these transactions was almost as important for his object, as to be correct in the narration of purely English occurrences. If he desired to avoid the labor, from which he might well wish to be excused, of mastering the great accumulation of contemporary and original French authorities, he might have resorted with propriety, as he has done in the case of the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, to Henri Martin's noble history, or to the history of Sismondi, not to speak of Soldan, Von Polenz, and a host of others. Varillas wrote, about a century after the events he described, a number of works of slender literary, and still slighter historical value. His "Histoire de Charles IX." (Cologne, 1686)--the work which Mr. Froude has but too often followed--begins with an adulatory dedication to Louis XIV., the first sentence of which sufficiently reveals the author's prepossessions: "Sire, it is impossible to write the history of Charles IX. without beginning the panegyric of your Majesty." No wonder that Mr. Froude's account of the massacre of Vassy (History of England, vii. 401, 402), derived solely from this source (Hist. de Charles IX., i. 126, etc.), is as favorable to Guise as his most devoted partisan could have desired. But where in the world--even in Varillas--did the English historian ever find authority for the statement (vii. 402) that, in consequence of the necessity felt by Guise for temporizing, a little later "_the affair at Vassy was censured in a public decree_"? To have allowed _that_ would have been for Guise to admit that he was guilty of murder, and that his enemies had not slandered him when they styled him a "butcher of the human race." The duke _never did_ make such an acknowledgment; on the contrary, he asseverated his innocence in his last breath. What was really done on the occasion referred to was to try to shift the responsibility of the war from the shoulders of the papists to those of the Huguenots, by pretending to re-enact the edict of January with restrictions as to the capital. [42] Jean de Serres, ii. 17, 18; De Thou, iii. 132, 133.