The Order of the Holy Ghost was instituted by Henri, out of gratitude for two events, for which no other individual had cause to be grateful. He was (when Duke of Anjou) elected King of Poland, on the day of Pentecost, 1573, and on the same day in the following year he succeeded to the crown of France. Hence the Order with its hundred members, and the king as grand master. St. Foix, in his voluminous history of the order, furnishes the villanous royal founder with a tolerably good character. This is more than any other historian has done; and it is not very satisfactorily executed by this historian himself. He rests upon the principle that the character of a king, or his disposition rather, may be judged by his favorites. He then points to La Marck, Mangiron, Joyeuse, D’Epernon, and others. Their reputations are not of the best, rather of the very worst; but then St. Foix says that they were all admirable swordsmen, and carried scars about them, in front, in proof of their valor: he evidently thinks that the _bellica virtus_ is the same thing as the other virtues. On the original roll of knights there are names now more worthy of being remembered. Louis de Gonzague, Duke de Nevers, was one of these. On one occasion, he unhorsed the Huguenot Captain de Beaumont, who, as he lay on the ground, fired a pistol and broke the ducal kneepan. The Duke’s squire bent forward with his knife to despatch the Captain; the Duke, however, told the latter to rise. “I wish,” said he, “that you may have a tale to tell that is worth narrating. When you recount, at your fireside, how you wounded the Duke de Nevers, be kind enough to add that he gave you your life.” The Duke was a noble fellow. Would that his generosity could have restored his kneepan! but he limped to the end of his days. But there was a nobler than he, in the person of the Baron d’Assier, subsequently Count de Crussol and Duke d’Uzes. He was a Huguenot, and I confess that I can not account for the fact of his being, at any time of his life, a Knight of the Order of the Holy Ghost. Henri III. was not likely to have conferred the insignia even on a pervert. His name, however, is on the roll. He was brave, merciful, pious, and scrupulously honest. When he captured Bergerai, he spared all who had no arms in their hands, and finding the women locked up in the churches, he induced them to return home, on promise of being protected from all molestation. These poor creatures must have been marvellously fair; and the baron’s eulogy on them reminds me of the expression of the soldiers when they led Judith through the camp of Holofernes: “Who could despise this people that have among them such women.”