Bernard Palissy.--Over the name and fame of Palissy hangs an aureola of glory. He was a potter, and he learned his trade through much perseverance and much suffering. But, more than that, he was a Protestant in the days of the Leaguers, when to be a Protestant in France meant to persecute or to be persecuted; and it meant also peril and probable death. Palissy was born about 1510, and died in 1590. He lived, therefore, through the times of the bitter and cruel wars of the Huguenots and the Catholics, when political and religious and social intrigues divided the nobility of France into factions, which were not only ready to, but did, rend each other's throats. He lived--he, a Protestant--through the wholesale butcheries of St. Bartholomew (1572), when it is asserted that from twenty to one hundred thousand Protestants were slaughtered in the kingdom of France in cold blood. Palissy was one of those Protestants, was known as one, and he was not slaughtered. From this fact has come a good part of his glory, as a few words may serve to explain. For a long time the struggle for power between the Catholic party and the Huguenot party had raged, with varying fortunes, when both sides pillaged and persecuted, and true religion was driven to the wall, or fled from France. At last the Catholic party, under the lead of the Duke of Guise, secured the preëminence, and in due time--in 1559--severe edicts were issued against the Protestants. Palissy was not safe; but by that time he had acquired reputation as a potter, and had made pieces of his rustic ware for the king and for members of the court. He was known to the king; and the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medicis, brought him to Paris, established his furnaces in the grounds of the Tuileries, made him a servant of the king, and so saved him for the time from the persecutions which swept away his brethren. It must be remembered that those were days in which many men _believed_--believed that their truth or faith was the only thing to save them from the eternal fires of hell. Palissy was one of those earnest, intense, narrow natures who believed their faith was the only true faith for man. All the influence of the queen, the persuasions of the priests, and even the appeals of the king, could not shake him. Palissy has written his own story, and it has the interest of romance and the fervor of faith. When he was eighty years old he was thrown into the Bastile, with other stanch Huguenots, because of his faith. The king, Henry III., is reported to have said: "My good friend, you have now been five-and-forty years in the service of my mother and myself; we have allowed you to retain your religion in the midst of fire and slaughter. Now I am so hard pressed by the Guises and my own people, that I am constrained to deliver you up into the hands of your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burned unless you are converted."