The exclusive glorification of Protestantism in the master-work of Kaulbach has also been an occasion of another lamentable omission. It is not enough--be it said without excessive and immoderate partiality toward our own country--it is not enough to have made France represented only by Calvin and by Coligny in the imposing _cortége_ of all the glories of the sixteenth century. This systematic exclusion is explained even by itself. In such a composition the places of honor were to be reserved to the countries which welcomed Protestantism with an enthusiasm so ardent, or submitted themselves to its dictation with so strange a docility. One knows, on the other hand, what insurmountable resistance France opposed to the introduction and establishment of Protestantism. It cost her, it is true, more than forty years of continual wars. And what wars those terrible fratricidal and religious strifes of the sixteenth century were; stirred up and kept alive on both sides by the most violent passions, and which, after the unhappy and sanguinary convulsions in which were consumed the reigns of Henry II., Francis II., Charles IX., and Henry III., would have ended surely in the breaking up of the ancient national unity, if Providence had not, at the conclusion of those frightful dissensions, caused to intervene a prince pre-destined to pacify the minds, quiet the discords, and close up and heal the deep wounds of the country! Henry IV. arrives at the end of the sixteenth century, as it were in order to bring about union between Protestantism vanquished and Catholicity triumphant. He gives to the latter the pledge of a public conversion; to the former, the benefit of a legal existence; and, especially in rendering sacred the respect due to minorities, he demonstrates, better than by all arguments, and perhaps for the very reason that his conversion was less a work of devotion than of policy, how the genius of the French nation was opposed to the doctrines of the reformers. Whatever may be said of the equivocal sincerity of his Catholicity and of the blemishes of his private life, Henry IV., who belongs to the sixteenth century by his birth, by his elevation to the throne and some of the most considerable transactions of his reign, worthily represents, at the close of an epoch so disturbed, some of the highest and most rightful aspirations of what may be called, right or wrong, the spirit of modern times. Great prince assuredly was he who could cause to triumph over passions envenomed by the civil and religious wars of half a century that love of common country, in which, despite of all that would divide them, the French people ought to feel themselves children of the same mother and defenders of the same flag. {62} The exclusion--almost entire--of France from a picture designed to glorify the sixteenth century, is not the only, nor even the gravest, reproach which historical criticism has the right to address to its author.