It is hardly necessary to add that his morality generally was on a par with the particular specimens we have given of it. Crowds of courtesans accompanied him to the camp, while he deliberately exposed his own wife, Anne of Este, the sister of Tasso’s Leonora, to the insulting homage of a worthless king. Emphatically may it be said that the truth was not in him. He gloried in mendacity. No other personage that I can call to mind ever equalled him in lying--except, perhaps, those very highly professing heroes who swagger in Greek tragedy. He procured, by a lie, the capital conviction of Condé. The latter escaped the penalty, and taxed the duke with his falsehood. Guise swore by his sword, his life, his honor, his very soul, that he was innocent of the charge. Condé looked on the ducal liar with a withering contempt, and turned from him with a sarcasm that should have pierced him like a sword. Pointed as it was, it could not find way through his corslet to his heart. He met it with a jest, and deemed the sin unregistered. There was a watchful public, nevertheless, observing the progress made toward greatness by the chivalric duke, and his brother the cardinal. Henry II. had just received the mortal blow dealt him at a tournament by the lance of Montgomery. Francis II., his brother, the husband of Mary Stuart, and therewith nephew to Guise, succeeded to the uneasy throne and painful privileges of Henri. On the night of this monarch’s decease, two courtiers were traversing a gallery of the Louvre. “This night,” said one, “is the eve of the Festival of the Three Kings.” “How mean you by that?” asked the other with a smile. “I mean,” rejoined the first, “that to-morrow we shall have three monarchs in Paris--one of them, King of France; the others Kings _in_ France--from Lorraine.” Under the latter two, Duke and Cardinal, was played out the second act of the great political drama of Lorraine. It was altogether a melo-drama, in which there was abundance of light and shadow. At times, we find the hero exhibiting exemplary candor; anon, he is the dark plotter, or the fierce and open slayer of his kind. There are stirring scenes of fights, wherein his adversaries draw their swords against him, at the instigation of a disgusted King, who no sooner saw Guise triumphant, than he devoted to death the survivors whom he had clandestinely urged into the fray. The battles were fought, on one side, for liberty of conscience; on the other, for the sake of universal despotism. The bad side triumphed during a long season; and field after field saw waving over it the green banner of Lorraine. Catherine de Medicis, and her son Charles IX., accompanied the Duke in more than one struggle, after the short-lived reign of Francis II. had come to an end. They passed, side by side, through the breach at Rouen; but accident divided them at Orleans, where had assembled the gallant few who refused to despair for the Protestant cause.