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from the copious extracts we mean to borrow.

There is a very pretty little preface in which the editor has thrown together a slight sketch of the life and character of his author. The ambassador was of an Alsatian family, (the original name Bessenstein, contracted Bestein, and translated Bassompierre), but he entered at a very early age in to the service of Henry IV., and was throughout all the rest of his life a thorough Frenchman. He had just

arrived in Paris to take a view of that gay capital, when some young gentlemen, to whom he became known, were preparing to get up a ballet for the diversion of Henry, who was in a convalescent state at Monceaux.

"Bassompierre, though unintroduced and unknown to the king, was accidentally associated in the party, and, with his gay companions, and all the equipage of their sport, proceeded, in six coaches, to the royal presence. The ballet seems to have been somewhat satirical. The king's indisposition was a surgical case, and the giddy troop, in the disguise of barber-surgeons, ventured to amuse the good-natured monarch with his own infirmity. When the ballet was over, young Bassompierre was introduced to the king, and by him to the " Belle Gabrielle," Duchess of Beaufort, the hem of whose garment he at first kissed; but the gallant Henry walked aside to afford the young cavalier an opportunity (as he tells us) of kissing her in earnest.

"In short, Henry was captivated with Bassompierre, and Bassompierre, of course with Henry. This interview transformed the young Alsatian into a Frenchman; and (with the exception of a campaign or two in Hungary in 1603 and 1604,) the rest of his life was passed in the service of France, in which he obtained, besides the king's orders of knighthood, public embassies, and other minor favours, the great military offices of colonel-general of the Swiss, and marshal of France.

"He was made to prosper. His personal accomplishments, his courage, wit, gallantry, and generosity, justified the favours he received; but the title of a favourite, even in those days of favouritism, he had the good sense or good fortune to escape. He was treated by Henry IV. with distinction and with friendship; by Louis XIII. he was respected, employed, and advanced; by Mary of Medicis he was honoured with a confidence and esteem, softened, perhaps, by the difference of sexes; and Richelieu paid him the still higher compliment of fearing and persecuting him.

"His lot was brilliant :-the pattern of all the men-the passion of all the womenspending his life between the extremes of military hardship and courtly pleasures.

He was in the combination of his merits, and his faults (and we can hardly distinguish them,)-the most remarkable man of his age; and one is not at all surprised at finding the proud but well-judging Mademoibrilliant visions of her youth, selle de Montpensies recording among the "cet illustre Bassompierre."

"In 1601, happening to be at Calais, his friend, the Duke of Biron," debauched him into an excursion to England. Bassompierre got no further than London. Queen Elizabeth being at the Vine, in had the pleasure of seeing her majesty Hampshire, Biron followed her thither, and

hunt, attended by more than fifty ladies, all mounted on hackneys." Next day he returned to rejoin his friend in London, and after a further stay of three days the travellers returned to France-Biron to lose his life on a scaffold, and Bassompierre to risk his in the field, and hardly less often in the city. In the latter he encountered all the adventures incident to a profligate and punctilious court, a turbulent capital, and unsettled times.

"He passed through them all with honour, and generally with safety; in one adventure, however, he was not so fortunate. "On Tuesday the 27th Feb. 1605, the king said to the Duke of Guise, ⚫ D'Entragues despises us all, she is so enamoured of Bassompierre,-I say it who know it.' 'Sire,' answered the Duke of Guise, you have means enough to revenge yourself; but for me, I have only those of a knight-errant, and I will break three lances with him in open lists, this very evening if your majesty will afford us a field." " (Mem. i. 164.)

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"The king consented-the court yard of the Louvre was immediately gravelled for the tourney-the knights met the duke's lance was shivered; but by awkwardness or malice he gave poor Bassompierre a most dreadful and dangerous wound with the ragged stump. He was borne off the field amidst the tears of the king and all the spectators, and the ladies of the court crowded with amorous anxiety to watch, with their own eyes, the disgusting operations of the surgeons. Bassompierre believed his hurt to be mortal, and prepared to die with the piety and courage of a christian knight. He recovered, however, and the constant attendance of princesses and ladies round his bed repaid, in his opinion, his danger and his sufferings.

"But it was not the fair sex alone that was dazzled and captivated by Bassompierre. The old Constable de Montmorenci selected the happy stranger as the husband of his only daughter, the richest and most beautiful woman of France. This match was defeated by a most unexpected obstacle. Henry IV., though now in his fifty-seventh year, fell madly, literally madly, in love with the beautiful heiress; and thinking his friend Bassompierre likely to prove an unaccommodating husband, interfered to marry Mllc.

de Montmorenci, in spite of herself and her family, to the Prince de Condé, whom he expected (but he was mistaken) to find of a more convenient temper.

"The king considered his conduct in this affair as a favour and not an injury to Bassompierre. He even had the goodness to tell him that he was too much his friend to let him marry a woman whom he intended to debauch; and so, designing to be

"A little more than kin and less than kind," he united her to his cousin.

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"Bassompierre does not seem to have been sufficiently grateful for this delicate distinction; he however appears to have consoled himself for this disappointment by triumphs in other quarters. In the year 1607, he won at play, though distracted from it by a thousand follies of youth and love,' upwards of 500,000 livres, and the day before he was sent to the Bastille he burned more than six thousand love letters, with which different ladies had been from time to time so good as to honour him. Nor was he less successful at court or in war :-he was a thriving statesman and a victorious soldier, and appears to have obtained, without effort or affectation, every species of glory.

"But, the paths of glory lead but to the grave,' and often to the grave through the dungeon.

"The gallant, gay, illustre Bassompierre passed the melancholy evening of his glorious day in the Bastille, a prisoner from the fifty-second to the sixty-fourth year of his age.

"The substantial motive was his attachment to the queen-mother, Mary of Medicis, and his supposed complicity in the intrigues against Richelieu; but the immediate cause, as we gather from his own account, is singularly trivial. He passed twelve years in a dungeon because he had not kept an engagement to dinner.

"On that famous St. Martin's day, the 11th Nov. 1630, (so justly called la Journée des Dupes,') when Richelieu's enemies had shaken, and flattered themselves that they had overthrown, his credit, and that the queen-mother and the queen-consort would henceforward possess the whole power of the state; when Louis fled to Versailles to avoid the trouble of dismissing his minister, and the monks of Pontoise were preparing the dormitory of the disgraced cardinal; in short, while the intrigue was in balance, and

Jove, in air,

Weigh'd the men's wits against the lady's

hair,

Bassompierre happened to meet Richelieu going into the Luxembourg to make one final attempt to reconcile himself with the queen-mother. Ah,' said his eminence, you care little about a poor disgraced fellow like me.' The honest Bassompierre was stung at the reproach, and, in token of

his undiminished regard, invited himself to dine with his Eminence, who accepted the offer, and went into the closet; but during his prolonged audience, most unfortunately for Bassompierre-(he swears he knew nothing of what was going on, but can we believe him ?)-the Duke de Longueville happened to pass that way, and debauched' the marshal to a dinner with the Duke of Orleans and M. de Crequi, all capital enemies of the cardinal;-who (finding the queen presumptuous and inexorable, and seeing that even his intended guest had abandoned him,) left his too confident enemies to dine at Paris at their leisure,took the bold resolution of following the king to Versailles,-regained his influence over the mind of the weak sovereign,-and blasted in half an hour the long-nursed hopes of the Dupes. In a short time he felt himself strong enough to exile the queen-mother, to annihilate the queenconsort, and to send Bassompierre to the Bastille, where he expiated, till the cardinal's death, the unlucky breach of his dinner engagement.

"It must be confessed that Richelieu

had some little reason to suspect the marshal; and the imperious priest, who afterwards saw the heads even of the king's dearest favourites roll at his feet, probably thought that he was acting with great lenity in condemning Bassompierre only to a perpetual imprisonment.

"The duplicity with which the cardinal appears to have subsequently behaved to the marshal, by flattering him with hopes of his release, for ever renewed and for ever deceived, is perhaps more disgusting than the original violence; and we are wonder-struck at the mixture of meanness and impudence with which Richelieu used, for his occasional purposes, to borrow from his victim a beautiful villa at Chaillot, upon which Bassompierre had employed all his taste and magnificence. While the unhappy owner was languishing on a truckle bed within four bare walls, the cardinal would send to ask permission to enjoy his luxurious couches and costly furniture: this was indeed adding insult to injury.

"His death, however, restored the prisoner to liberty; and the death of the king, and the succession of the queen-consort to the regency, recalled Bassompierre to the slippery heights of court favour.

"He was now offered the honourable trust of being governor to the young king, Louis XIV.; but age, and perhaps the severe but wholesome medicine of the Bastille, had cured him of ambition. He declined the offer; and in about three years followed his persecutor to the place where the wicked cease to trouble, and where the weary are at rest.' He died of an apoplexy at the house of his friend, the Duke of Vitry, in Champaigne, on the 12th April, 1646.

.

As there is no attempt at connexion

in the notes which form the valuable part of this volume, we shall make none in our extracts from them. We merely wish to give our readers an idea of their contents. In commenting on some accidental delay which occurred in the Ambassador's journey through Picardy towards Calais, he takes occasion to say

"There is reason to think that travelling was, on the whole, nearly as expeditious Bassomthen in France as it is now. pierre tells us, in another part of his Memoirs, that he and four friends went in a coach from Paris to Rouen in one day (between seventy and eighty miles); but this is mentioned as remarkable, and will be so at this day with such a coach; and it is not easy to accomplish it even with one of our modern coaches.

"In England there can be little doubt that he travelled with private horses, and this will account for the slowness of his progress: travelling post in carriages was not then the practice; though, in riding post, our ancestors did feats which we can not rival.

"Sir Robert Cary, afterwards Earl of Monmouth, tells us himself, that when he carried the account of Queen Elizabeth's death to King James in Scotland, he rode from London to Edinburgh, 400 miles, in about 60 hours, a wonderful instance of celerity, even without considering his stops at Doncaster and Witherington (which latter, particularly, must have been of some hours), and a bad fall which he had at Norham. But even this is outdone by a worthy, of whom we read in Stow, who performed 144 miles by land, and two voyages by sea, of about twenty-two miles each, in seventeen hours. For so wonderful a story, I am inclined to let the honest chronicler vouch in his own words.

"Saturday, the seaventeenth day of July, 1619, Bernard Calvert, of Andover, about three a clock in the morning, towke horse at Saint Georges Church in Southwarke, and came to Dover about seaven of the clocke the same morning, where a barge, with eight oares, formerly sent from London thither, attended his suddaine comming: he instantly towke barge, and went to Callice, and in the same barge returned back to Dover, about three of the clocke the same day, where, as well there as in divers other places, he had layed sundry swift horses, besides guides; he rode back from thence to S. George's Church in Southwarke the same evening, a little after eight a clock, fresh and lusty.' (Stow, 1032.) "All our modern match-riders must

hide their diminished heads."

Among the first persons who wait upon Bassompierre after his arrival in London, is the Chevalier de Jars, a French nobleman then in disgrace at

the Court of Paris. The note informs
that
us,

When Richelieu wished to reconcile
himself with the queen, he recalled de Jars,
Madame de Chevreuse, and others of her
friends: but on their return, their own
cabals or the jealousy of the minister again
occasioned their disgrace. De Jars was put
into the Bastile, and only removed from it
to be tried for his life at Tours. In passing
through the court of the Bastile he saw his
old friend Bassompierre, and some other
prisoners of state, and he called out to bid
them farewell, and to assure them, that,
whatever should become of him, he would
be true to his friends and to himself.' He
conducted himself, during his trial, with
great firmness: but he was condemned to
death, upon an engagement from Richelieu
to the judges that the sentence should not
be carried into effect: he was, however,
brought out on the scaffold; and, just as
he had laid his head on the block, his par-
don was announced. It was observed, that
he remained a long time stupified, without
the power of speaking, or the appearance of
feeling. He was then banished into Italy;
but, after the death of Richelieu and of
Louis XIII. Anne of Austria, now regent,
recalled him, and he was one of the princi-
pal gentlemen of her private society.

"This pardon on the scaffold reminds me of another remarkable one of the same period.

Warrants were sent down into Hampshire, in December 1604, for the executions of Lords Cobham and Grey, who were concerned in what is called Raleigh's plot. There seems to have been a great deal of mysterious and cruel juggle in the treatment of those unhappy noblemen at that dreadful moment. They were brought forth, and remanded, and brought forth again, in short, their agony was strangely protracted, they however passed through this ordeal with credit: Cobham particularly, who was a strange compound of knave and fool. It was expected that his behaviour on the scaffold would afford only matière pour rire, to use the unfeeling phrase of Carleton; but he behaved with such clear and collected courage, as to force from the same person the remarkable expression of its being easier to die well than to live well. They looked,' Carelton adds, strange upon one another, like men beheaded, and met again in the other world.'" (Hardwicke's State Papers, i. 391.)

An equally casual notice of the second Earl of Salisbury is made to apologize for the introduction of the following anecdote of his more illustrious father, the grandson of Thomas Lord Burleigh, and Secretary of Elizabeth.

"Sir Robert Cecil served the Queen with

ability and fidelity; but he had also an eye to the rising sun, and was in correspondence with James during the latter years of his reign. Next to, or perhaps

even before, her personal vanity, Elizabeth's ruling passion was jealousy of her successor; and if she had suspected Cecil of tampering with James, it may well be supposed that she would have wreaked her violent indignation upon him. He had, on one occasion, a very narrow escape while riding in the Queen's coach, (an indulgence to the ease of her latter years) on Blackheath; the post from Scotland passed, and the Queen, always anxious on the subject of Scotland, commanded the Secretary to stop him, and open the despatches in her presence. Cecil's presence of mind saved him; he gained some time by sending for a knife to cut open the cord that tied the despatches, and this gave him time to recollect that the Queen hated ill-smells, and feared contagion, even more than she loved Scotch news; he affected to perceive an unsavoury smell, which induced her Highness to order him and the tainted despatches out of her sight.

"He was the inventor of the scheme of raising money by the creation of baronets, a cheapening of honours much improved upon in the beginning of Charles's reign; when, by proclamation, every gentleman of £40 a year was called in to be knighted. This arbitrary buckling of honour on folk's backs' reminds me of the pleasantry of Admiral Payne, who, in our own times, when some one told him he was to be knighted, exclaimed, with affected indignation, no, no, by G-, not without a court martial.'

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"Up to James's reign there was but one secretary of state; but, on the resignation (Aul. Coq. says the death of Cecil, Earl of Salisbury), there were two created, as if no one man could supply the place of that able minister. This reminds me of the promotion of eight marshals of France, on the death of Turenne; a great compliment to his memory, which Madame de Cornuel pleasantly explained by calling the eight new marshals change for M. de Turenne."" One of the longest notes refer to Frances Howard, daughter of Lord Bindon, and widow of Lodowick, Duke of Lennox. She was a woman of great intrigue, and the Ambassador had found it convenient to secure her good word by paying her a visit.

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"She was the widow, first, of a Mr Prannell a citizen, secondly, of Edward Earl of Hertford, and now of the Duke of Lennox, a kinsman of the king's. Though her first match was so humble, she was a vain, ambitious woman. "While Countess of Hertford she was fond of discoursing very loftily about her grandfathers, the Dukes of Norfolk and Buckingham; but if her husband happened to come in he would bring her down from these noble flights, with asking, Frank, Frank, how long is it since you were married to Prannell ?" Wilson, 259.) The Indelicacy of the reproof was but of little VOL. V.

consequence to persons of their tempers, for he had three wives, as she, at last, had three husbands; and it is odd that they seemed carefully to reverse the gradations of rank in their respective and successive spouses. She began with a merchant, rose to an earl, and finished with a duke of royal blood. He began with a daughter of a duke of royal blood (Lady Catharine Grey,) next married the daughter of an earl (Nottingham,) and finally descended to the merchant's widow. But neither the number or rank of her husbands seemed to have satisfied this aspiring dame, for Wilson tells us, amongst other curious anecdotes of her, that she looked to another and a greater. For, finding the king (James) a widower, she vowed, after so great a prince as Richmond, never to be blown with kisses, or eat at the table of a subject; and this vow must be spread abroad that the king may notice the bravery of her spirit; but this bait would not catch the old king, and she, to make good her resolution, speciously observed her vow to the last.' (258.) A curious incident in her history remains to be told. After Prannell's death a young, beautiful, and childless widow-she attracted the affection of Sir George Rodney, a gentleman of the west, who had some encouragement and hopes of succeeding in his suit; but he, it seems, was not exalted enough for such a proud spirit, and she, on the first summons, jilted the knight, and surrendered to the Earl of Hertford, who took her down to Amesbury, in Wiltshire. Thither Rodney followed them, and shutting himself up in a room of an inn in the town, wrote a large paper of well-composed verse in his own blood, addressed to the new countess: wherein he bewails his loss, and laments his misfortunes. Having finished this melancholy elegy, he ran himself upon his sword, and died on the spot! She was not of a temper to be much affected with this catastrophe. She died in 1679."

In regard to the singular subject of Buckingham's passion for the French queen, various curious particulars are scattered over the volume. The following is by far the longest note on this theme:

"It is, however, impossible to doubt that Buckingham had the audacity to entertain, and even to avow, improper sentiments of tenderness towards the French queen; for Madame de Motteville, the creature and apologist of Anne of Austria, plainly admits the existence of this impertinent passion. Every one knows, that, during the stay of the prince and Buckingham in France, on their return out of Spain, the behaviour of the latter towards Anne of Austria was so bold and offensive as to give umbrage to Louis XIII.; and after they had proceeded on their way home, (hastened away by the jealousy of the French court,) Buckingham had the ro2 N

mantic and almost incredible audacity to steal back, (leaving the prince on the road,) and make his way in secret, and at an undue hour, even into the bed-chamber of the queen, whence, after a scene of intreaties, tears, and vows, (permitted, accepted, but, as it would seem, not requited), the amorous duke again took post, and made the best of his way back to join his royal and patient fellow-traveller.

"The duke's vexation at his dismissal was so great, that he was heard to declare that he would come to France again in spite of the jealous husband; which, however, neither as friend nor foe was he able to accomplish.

"There was here foundation enough for malice to trace the French war to the personal resentment of Buckingham; but, (though, perhaps, this may have sharpened his enmity), with so much evidence of other sufficient causes of difference between the two courts, it would be going too far to admit this folly as the primum mobile of the

war.

"That the death of Louis and Buckingham should have rendered this subject less delicate, I can well understand; but he is not prepared to find it treated so boldly, so publicly, and so lightly, as we learn from a passage of Madame de Motteville's Memoirs that it was.

"The queen mother, happening one day to meet Voiture, musing in the garden at Ruel, asked him what he was thinking of; to which the wit immediately replied,in the following bold and agreeable verses, at which the queen was not at all offended; and she thought them so pretty, that she kept them for a long time after in her cabinet.' Memoires de Motteville, 1, 231. "Je pensois que la destinée, Après tant d'injustes malheurs, Vous a justement couronnée De gloire, d'éclat, et d'honneurs : Mais que vous étiez plus heureuse, Lorsque vous étiez autrefois,

Je ne veux pas dire amoureuse,— La rime le veut toutefois.Je pensois ;-car nous autres Poëtes Nous pensons extravagamment, Ce que dans l'humeur où vous êtes, Vous feriez, si dans ce moment Vous avisiez en cette place Venir le Duc de Bokingham 3Et lequel seroit en disgrace De lui ou du Pere Vincent!Le Pere Vincent, over whom Voiture supposed the duke would gain so easy a victory, was the queen's confessor."

There are, however, many notes of a much more serious character than these one we shall venture to quote (in spite of the length to which our extracts have already extended,) because we are sure our readers will admire it as much as we ourselves do.

"One cannot but remark, however, as

an additional proof of the similarity which has existed between the course of public events and the progress of manners in England and France, that the system of favouritism-which so scandalously prevailed in the reign of James I. and was a fatal legacy to his successor-reigned in France at the same period, with similar scandal, though not with such immediately fatal results. The character and circumstances of Louis XIII. and James I. had several points of resemblance-both the children of assassinated sovereigns, they both succeeded great princes whose capacity and glory only threw their successors into a deeper shade; both well meaning and well informed, lovers of peace, and little prone to gallantry themselves, they were governed by a succession of favourites, loose, profligate, turbulent, and daring, who had no other recommendation to favour than youth and beauty, and hardly any other qualifications than expertness in hunting, and such sports and pastimes; and Luynes, and St Simon, and Cinq-Mars, might form the parallels in a modern Plutarch, of Montgomery, Somerset, and Buckingham. Happy it might have been for Charles, though perhaps not for the liberties of England, if the longer life of Cecil, or the earlier influence of Strafford, had afforded a fellow for Richelieu. Like causes produced like effects. The two monarchs left to their children dissensions with their parliaments, and their kingdoms in a state of ferment, which soon burst into open rebellion and twenty years of civil war and anarchy desolated the neighbouring nations. The vigour of the English character-the consistency which the British constitution had already taken -the lights and rights of self-judgment, which the Reformation had introduced; and perhaps the comparative narrowness of the stage on which the scene was acted, brought the affairs of the English monarchy to an earlier crisis: but what was deferred was not lost. Circumstances peculiar to France, and the vigorous and magnificent character of Louis XIV., turned the energies of his subjects into a new direction.But the seeds of change were sown in France and it is not too much to say, that the recollections of the Fronde had some influence on the quarrels of Louis XV. with his parliaments, and that the endeavours of the latter to exercise and to extend their constitutional rights, led eventually, to the catasthough unintentionally, trophe of Louis XVI., and completed the unhappy comparison which I have endeavoured, perhaps too fancifully, to sketch.— The time consumed in their progress was different; but the beginnings, the means, and the results, have a striking similarity. One word more. Our restoration was, through the folly of James, followed by another revolution. Is it not to be apprehended that France will complete the pa rallel even to its last stage ?"

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