Junius is the knight-errant of liberty, who fights with closed

visor.

Luther shook all Germany to its foundations; but Francis Drake pacified it again, — he gave us the potato.

Rothschild, too, might build a Valhalla, a Pantheon for all the princes who have raised loans from him.

A communist proposes that Rothschild shall share with him his three hundred millions of francs. Rothschild sends him his share, nine sous: "Now, then, let me have peace."

When a king has lost his head, there is no further help for him. Napoleon was not of that wood of which kings are made: he was of that marble of which gods are formed.

Atheism is the last word of theism (L'athéisme est le dernier mot du théisme).

To some one who said he could understand rationalism, but not atheism.

HENRY VIII.

[King of England; born at Greenwich, 1491; ascended the throne, 1509; defeated the Scotch at Flodden Field, 1513; contended for supremacy with Charles V. and Francis I.; declared Supreme Head of the Church, 1531; excommunicated, 1538; died 1547; his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, surviving him.]

He whom I favor wins (Cui adhæreo præest).

The motto on his tent in the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a plain near Calais, France, on which Henry met Francis I., and held for nearly three weeks a series of magnificent entertainments, June, 1520.

Get my bill passed by to-morrow, or else to-morrow this head of yours will be off!

To Mr. Edward Montague, a member of the House of Commons, which hesitated to pass a bill dissolving certain monasteries, 1536. The bill passed. On another occasion when the House hesitated in the morning, but proved tractable in the afternoon, he said, "It was well you did, or your heads would have been upon Temple Bar."

Cranmer has got the right sow by the ear.

Giving his decision in favor of Cranmer's opinion concerning the best method of procuring his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. When Sir Robert Walpole was asked how he had overcome Sir Spencer Compton, to whom the king was partial, he replied, "He got the wrong sow by the ear, and I the right." "So vulgar and idiomatic,” says Jennings, “are the phrases of English monarchs and ministers."— Anecdotal History of Parlia ment. Heywood's "Proverbs," published the year before the king's death, contains this one; and it is used by Jonson and Colman, and occurs in "Hudibras," II. 3, 580.

HENRY IV.

[King of France and Navarre; founder of the royal house of Bourbon; born at Pau, Dec. 14, 1553; educated by his mother in the Protestant faith; married the sister of Charles IX., and barely escaped the massacre of St. Bartholomew; became king of France, 1589, on the failure of the house of Valois; was opposed by the Duc de Mayenne, over whom he gained the battle of Ivry, 1590; embraced the Catholic religion, 1593; entered Paris, 1594; proclaimed the Edict of Nantes, 1598; encouraged manufactures, agriculture, and learning; assassinated, May 14, 1610.]

I am your king, you are Frenchmen, there are the enemy: let us charge! (Je suis votre roi, vous êtes Français, voilà l'ennemi, donnons!)

At Ivry, near Evreux, in North-western France, where, as already mentioned (p. 221), he told his followers to keep his white plume in view.

For many years his inexhaustible spirits had sustained a cause which often looked desperate; and on that day, when told that he had provided no place of retreat, he replied, "There is no other retreat than the field of battle."

To the Comte de Bélin, who had been captured by Henry's light horse, and who, when brought to the camp, looked around for an army, but saw only small parties of soldiers here and there, the king exclaimed with a gay and confident air, "You do not perceive all that I have with me, M. de Bélin, for you do not reckon God and the right on our side." This was similar

to the countersign given by Richard I. at the battle of Gisors, where his troops defeated the French in 1198: "God and my right" (Dieu et mon droit), afterwards the motto of the arms of England.

While Mohammed and Abu-Bekir were in a cave near Mecca, before starting on the Hegira to Medina, the latter, contrasting their weakness with the strength of the enemy, which was led by the powerful tribe of Koreish, said, "We are but two." -"No," replied the prophet, "there is a third: it is God himself."

Hang yourself, brave Crillon.

Henry had already, in September, 1589, defeated five times his number at Arques, where he said to an old officer of the Swiss regiment, "Father, keep me a pike here; for I intend to fight at the head of your battalion." While endeavoring to rally his cavalry, he exclaimed to each horseman, man by man, "Cannot I find fifty gentlemen in all France resolute enough to die with their king?" He called out to a colonel whose regiment he was leading to a charge, "Comrade, I have come to die or win honor along with you." It was after this battle that he wrote to his friend Crillon, the Ney of the sixteenth century: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon: we have fought at Arques, and you were not there; but I love you all the same." This letter, which Fournier compares with that of Francis I. after Pavia, gained its celebrity by appearing in a note to Voltaire's "Henriade," VIII. 109; but it had already been printed in Bening's "Bouclier d'Honneur," Avignon, 1616. It was not written from the field of Arques, where Crillon could not have been, as in 1589 he had not joined Henry's party, but from the camp before Amiens, Sept. 20, 1597, an occasion not sufficiently brilliant to serve the purpose of the "Inventor of History," as Mme. du Deffand called Voltaire. The first sentence of the letter to the brave Grillon, as Henry calls him, is, "Hang yourself for not having been near me last Monday, on the finest occasion which ever was, and which may never be again" (Pendés-vous de n'avoir esté icy près de moy, lunely dernier, à la plus belle occasion qui se soit jamais veue, et qui peut-estre ne se verra jamais). . . . I hope to be next Thursday ns, where I shall tarry but little, but attempt some undertaking, for which I have the finest army imaginable. It only

in Amie

lacks the brave Crillon, who will always be welcome." Similar notes are possessed by great families in France, written by Henry to their ancestors; as that to one Manaud de Batz, in which the king says, "Those who obey implicitly their conscience are of my religion; and I am of the religion of all those who are brave and good" (Ceux qui suyvent tout droict leur conscyence sont de ma relygion, et je suis de celle de tous ceux-là quy sont braves et bons). When about to cut off from Paris its source of provisions, he wrote "as from the saddle-bow:" "I am going to be the good physician of my people, and prescribe a diet which will bring them back to health;" and, in ordering the seizure of five wineboats coming down the Seine, "Let nothing pass before convalescence: then we will have a feast together" (Ne leur laissés rien passer avant la convalescence, se sera pour la fester tous ensemble). — L'Esprit dans l'Histoire, chap. xxxv.

The charm which drew men to Henry was a natural one; but he had a maxim which explained his success: "Men catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with twenty tons of vinegar" (On prend plus de mouches avec une cuillerée de miel qu'avec vingt tonneaux de vinaigre). This has also been attributed to St. Francis de Sales.

Henry's unconventional manner, which, later on, assumed a bluffiness bordering on rudeness, is shown by his willingness to find a place of refuge, without the protection which his attendants thought necessary: "Who ever heard," he said, "of a king dying in a hovel?"

I am going to take the perilous leap.

Voltaire, when seized with a hemorrhage a few weeks before his death, said, "Like my Henry IV., to-day I take the perilous leap;" alluding to the words of the king to Gabrielle d'Estrées on the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church, "C'est demain, ma belle amie, que je fais le saut périlleux.”

Watkins says that Hobbes, the metaphysician, was very much afraid of death, which he called "taking a leap in the dark;" and his last words were, "I am going to take a great leap into obscurity." Anecdotes of Men of Learning and Genius.

The Earl of Derby said in the House of Lords, Aug. 6, 1867, on the third reading of Disraeli's Reform Bill, "“No doubt, we

are making a great experiment, and 'taking a leap in the dark.' The expression is given as the translation of the last words attributed to Rabelais, "Je m'en vay chercher un grand Peut-estre" (literally: I am going in search of a great Perhaps).

As a reason for taking this leap, we have the celebrated mot: "Paris is worth a mass (Paris vaut une messe; or, La couronne raut bien une messe). "In whatever form it may be given," it is, says Fournier, "a very impudent expression. If it had occurred to Henry, when he resolved to abjure his religion in order to make his entrance to Paris and to the throne smoother, he was too shrewd to give utterance to it." Fournier, therefore, subscribes to the theory that when Henry IV. asked the Baron de Rosny (Sully), why he did not go to mass like himself, the Protestant courtier replied, "Sire, the crown is well worth a

mass."

The king said to the Catholic clergy in 1591, when he was urging them to be patient while he restored the prosperity of the Church, "Paris was not built in a day." The proverb, "Rome was not built in a day," is common to many languages.

streets.

When at last he entered the capital, which had taken sides with the League against him, and of which he had said during the siege, “I had rather conquer my foes by kindness than by arms," it was with difficulty that he could make his way through the The guards would have kept back the people who crowded around him, rejoiced that their sufferings were over: Henry, however, forbade it, saying, "They are starving to see a king." He had refused to expose them to the fury of his army: "Paris," he said, "must not become a graveyard;" but even without the horrors of an assault, their condition extorted the comment, "Poor people, how they must have been tyrannized

over!"

Hannibal had dined.

The

pomps and parades of royalty had no charms for King Henry IV. Many of his replies to wearisome provincial orators may have been invented by the ingenious historiographers, who have fastened their own fancies to his name. Thus, when a deputation from Marseilles began an address: "Hannibal leaving Carthage". The king interrupted them by saying, "Hannibal