as M. Sully-Prudhomme sings? People who had lost all belief in the saints had in those days the strongest faith in heaven and the stars. They believed readily enough that though the spirit, coming from God, is free, the vile physical body depends wholly on the stars— Aux corps vous donnez vostre loy, Comme un potier à son argile.[56] These celestial torches govern the universe. In vain man struggles, suffers, battles, strains all his powers; he is in the grip of a mysterious destiny. Ainsi vous plaist, estoilles!... En vain l’homme de sa prière Vous tourmente soir et matin; Il est traîné par son destin, Comme est un flot de la rivière.[57] —_Ronsard._ Women, particularly sensitive to the mystery of things, could not close their ears against such lofty scientific preoccupations. Renée of France implores the aid of the stars. Margaret exclaims, “their effects are felt in human bodies.” Yet the surrender was not complete, as one might be disposed to expect: it is a very remarkable fact that in spite of their natural impressibility and their genius for imaginative flights, they did not readily ascribe to medicine so supernal a glory. To them medicine was a science of the earth earthy, a practical and experimental science. The only metaphysical principle they associated with it came from without; and that was, charity. On the other hand they were wonderfully credulous.[58] One of their passions was to collect strange exotic recipes of any and every kind. Catherine Sforza, statesman as she was, spent hours in a private laboratory, receiving a Jewess who had brought her a universal salve, or verifying formulae for a celestial water, a cerebrine made of the marrow of an ass, a magnet intended to compose family squabbles, and a thousand other prescriptions of like virtue. One of her ambassadors sends her a drug chiefly compounded of eggs and saffron, of which he sings the virtues with a frenzy of enthusiasm: “I wish to be present when you test it.... I would not change places with the King of France, so happy am I in contemplating so admirable a thing; and besides, your Excellency would not find another man like me: for courage is required, not to be afraid of spirits; faith, to believe; secrecy, to betray nothing; and, finally, you need the instruments that I have; the Universities of Bologna, Ferrara, Paris, and Rome possess nothing like them.” At the very moment of going to war Catherine does not forget to write an order for the jars she needs for her experiments. Nevertheless, in all these strings of formulae, often so puerile and collected for collecting’s sake, we detect more than a collector’s mania: we cannot but see in them the thirst for the unknown—an attempt to pierce the impenetrable beyond. This effort, it may be admitted, was not very scientific. But was that of the most highly accredited physician any more so? Women accepted the doctrine that the