but his brother, the Prince of Condé, was a high-spirited, clever, resolute man, one to be kept down by all means. In reading the history of this period it must be constantly borne in mind, that the religious malcontents were often political malcontents also,[127] their number being increased by all who hated the monopoly of power so tenaciously held by the Guises. The small gentry, who in a spirit of opposition had accepted the Reformed doctrines, brought a new and fatal element into the movement. Despising Calvin’s advice to bear injuries, and that opposition to lawful authority is a crime, they were secretly preparing the means of resistance, which their ecclesiastical organization greatly facilitated. The impetuous gentlemen and soldiers returned insult for insult, and blow for blow. Thus day by day the political character of the Huguenots[128] (as the Reformers were called after the affair of Amboise) became more prominent. It was a deplorable but almost inevitable result of the combination against the house of Lorraine, and it proved the temporary destruction of French Protestantism. Ere long France was divided into two hostile camps; and although this will not excuse the harshness with which the Huguenots were treated, it will in some measure account for it. The Romish party were contending not only for religion but for supremacy, for place, for authority. Who should govern the king and the state was a question now quite as important as which faith was right, that of Geneva or of Rome? The age was one of great superstition and ignorance, and the foulest rumors were circulated against the Protestants, and greedily swallowed. Claude Haton, who has left us a striking and truthful picture of his time, supplies us with a curious illustration of the popular faith touching the Huguenots. He says that mad dogs had decreased so much during the last two years that people believed the devils had left the dogs and entered into the Reformers.[129] The Catholics were by no means scrupulous as to the weapons they employed to exasperate the fierce passions of the lower classes. There were few who could read the pamphlets, ballads, or broadsides which the printers poured forth with astonishing profusion; but all could understand the rude wood-cuts in which the Huguenots were represented as nailing iron shoes on the bare feet of a pious hermit, or making a target of a priest nailed to a cross. The pulpit was turned into an arena for abuse, whence the monks, who were far more inveterate against the Reformers than the secular clergy, inveighed with all the power of their lungs, and the copiousness of their abusive vocabulary, against the new doctrines and its professors. The Huguenots and their allies were not slow to retaliate, and in fierce invective were by no means inferior to their persecutors. The most notorious of their satires, or “libels,” was that known as _The Tiger_,[130] written against the Cardinal of