The Huguenots were accused of exulting at the king’s death; and we can almost excuse them, considering what they had suffered during his brief reign. Calvin looked upon it as the judgment of God. “Did you ever hear or read of any thing so opportune as the death of the little king,” he said. “Just when there was no remedy for our extreme evils, God suddenly appeared from heaven, and he who had pierced the eye of the father struck the ear of the son.”[156] Beza also regarded it in the same light. He says, the sword was already at our throats when “the Lord our God rose up and carried off that miserable boy by a death as foul as it was unforeseen. No royal honors were paid his corpse, and the enemy of the Lutherans was buried like a Lutheran.”[157] The people were but little attached to Francis, and called him “the king without vices,” to which the Huguenots added, “and without virtues.” He was in fact just what the persons about him made him. He was educated by Jacques Amyot, the learned translator of Plutarch, in an age when translating had not become a mechanical art. He had always been a sickly child, and there is a letter extant of his father’s, from which we learn, not only that Henry II. loved his children, but also the weakness of the dauphin’s constitution.[158] Voltaire very fairly describes him as a Faible enfant qui de Guise adorait les caprices, Et dont on ignorait et les vertus et les vices. _Henriade._ NOTE. One of the most violent of the satires aimed at the Cardinal of Lorraine was that called “The Tiger,” about which very little is known. The authorship is doubtful, the title disputed, and of two works recently brought to light, it is hard to say which is the original. De Thou speaks of a “libellus cui _Tigridi_ præfixus.” In a tract, “Religionis et Regis adversus Calvini, Bezæ et Ottomanni conjuratorum factionis defensio prima” (8vo. 1562, fol. 17), we read: “Hic te, Ottomanne, excutere incipio. Scis enim ex cujus officina _Tigris_ prodiit, liber certe tigridi parente dignissimus. Tute istius libelli authorem....” There is also extant a letter to Hotmann from Sturm, who was rector of the High School of Strasburg in June, 1562: “Ex hoc genere _Tygris_, immanis illa bellua quam _tu hic_ contra cardinalis existimationem divulgare curasti.” But if these two authorities are conclusive as to Hotmann’s authorship, they leave us in doubt as to what was the real title of the satire, and which is the original of two contemporary libels. To the researches of M. Charles Nodier we owe the discovery of a manuscript poem entitled: “Le Tigre, Satire sur les Gestes mémorables des Guysards” (4to, 1561), and beginning thus: