It was religious malignity that sharpened their daggers, and found vent in the fiendish yells that resounded through Paris on that fearful night. The slaying of heretics had never been rebuked by their religious teachers, but only encouraged and applauded. The thanksgivings at Rome were the proper sequel of the exhortations which had been sent forth from the saine seat of authority.

Was the Massacre of St. Bartholomew contrived long beforehand? So it was once thought. Davila, and other Italian writers, declared this to be the fact. To them, the event would have been shorn of a great part of its interest, if it did not occur as the result of a long and intricate plot. Even the authors of the crime, to account for the sudden reversal of their attitude towards Spain and for their previous acts of hostility against Philip, were willing to countenance this interpretation. of their conduct. The Huguenots, on whom the blow fell like a thunderbolt, and who had a right to consider those murderers of St. Bartholomew capable of infinite falsehood, naturally took this view. The treaty of St. Germain, the marriage of Navarre, the collecting of the Huguenot leaders in Paris, the offensive demonstrations in the Low Countries, were elements in a diabolical scheme for their destruction. Yet this theory was undoubtedly erroneous. Philip and Alva had been right in expecting a war with France. Not only the Navarre marriage, but the negotiations with Elizabeth respecting marriages and an alliance, were undertaken with a sincere intent on the part of Charles IX. and Catherine. The theory of a long premeditation of the great crime, and that all these transactions, stretching over two years, were steps in a deep-laid plot, is confuted by an irresistible amount of circumstantial evidence, and by the authentic testimony of Tavannes and Anjou, chief actors in the tragedy. The spell which Coligny had cast upon the mind of the King, whom he had impressed so far as to persuade him to enter into war, was what determined Catherine de Medici to bring about the death of the Admiral by the agency of the Guises. She probably anticipated that vengeance would be taken by the Huguenots upon these leaders of the Catholic faction; but for that she did not care. The fall of the leaders on both sides would strengthen her power. When the Admiral was wounded, instead of being killed; when she

saw that he survived with undiminished and even increased influence, and that her and Anjou's complicity in the attempt could not be concealed, she struck out another programme.

All this appears to be established by conclusive proofs. And yet, on the other hand, there are facts going to show that the thought of cutting off the Huguenot leaders had long haunted Catherine's mind; and that she even shaped the course of events in such a way as to enable her, if she found it expedient, to convert this thought into a definite purpose, and to carry it out in the deed.

The destruction of the Huguenot chiefs, as a means of paralyzing and crushing their party, had been recommended to her by Philip as early as 1560. At Bayonne, Alva had given her the same counsel. He had himself acted on his theory in the treacherous seizure and execution of Egmont and Horn. These things must have made the idea familiar to Catherine. In 1570, the Venetian Ambassador says that it was generally thought that it would be enough to strike off five or six heads. It is, at least, a curious coincidence, that Catherine declared, after the Massacre, that she took on herself the guilt of the murder of only six. It was Catherine who insisted that the wedding of Navarre should be at Paris. Other points she was willing to waive; but not this. What was her motive, unless it was to collect the Huguenots in a place where they would be in her power? In January, 1572, the Papal Legate wrote to Rome, that he had failed in all his efforts; yet there were some things, which he could only verbally report, which were not wholly unfavorable. Cardinal Salviati, a Florentine, a relative of the Medici, and intimate with Catherine, had informed Pius V. that there was a secret plan favorable to the Catholics. After the Massacre, Catherine reminded the Nunco of the word that she had sent to the Pope, that he would see how she and her son would avenge themselves on the Huguenots.

Facts of this nature appear to contradict the conclusion to which the general current of evidence leads us. They justify the inference, not that Catherine had resolved upon the deed, but that she was glad, even while pursuing an opposite policy, to provide herself with the means of doing it. Other princes of that day-Queen Elizabeth, for example-were fond of having two strings to their bow. While pursuing one policy,

Elizabeth was fond of holding in her hand the threads of another and opposite line of conduct. In this double intent of Catherine de Medici, we are presented, as Ranke has said, with a psychological problem, such as one occasionally meets with in historical study. It is like the question of Mary Stuart's participation in the murder of Darnley. These are problems which the philosopher and the poet are most competent to solve. They require, as the same great historian has said, an insight into the deep and complicated springs of action in the soul— the profound "abysses where the storms of passion rage," and where strange and appalling crimes have their birth. It would seem as if, in the brain of this devilish woman, whose depth of deceit she herself could hardly fathom, there were weaving at once two plots. While she was moving on one path, she was secretly making ready, should the occasion arise, to spring to another. If all should go well in amity with the Huguenots, she would be content; but if not, they would be helpless in her hands. Not only was she double-tongued, but she was double-minded; there was duplicity in her inmost thoughts and designs. But this occult thought, which finally developed into purpose and act, was confined to herself. The King had no share in it. Like Pilate, he gave consent. His crime was that he yielded to the pressure brought upon him by his inhuman mother and her confederates, and authorized a crime a parallel to which we can find only by going back of all Christian ages, to the bloody proscriptions of heathen Rome.*

It is interesting to glance at the fate of the authors of the Massacre. Less than two years after, on the 30th of May, 1574, Charles IX. died. On his death-bed, his brief intervals of sleep were disturbed by horrible visions. He suffered from violent hemorrhages, and sometimes awoke bathed in blood, which recalled to his mind the torrents of blood shed by his

*On the question whether the Massacre had been planned long before, there are three opinions. That it was so planned is maintained, among others, in an elaborate argument by Sir James Mackintosh, in his History of England, vol. iii. That there was no such premeditation is, at present, the more general opinion. It is clearly set forth by Professor Baird, in his recent History of the Rise of the Huguenots. The middle view which attributes to the Queen Mother a dual plot, is that maintained by Ranke, and appears to me to match best the evidence, collectively taken. Salviati's despatches, as copied by Chateaubriand, are in the Appendix of Mackintosh, vol. iii.

orders on that dreadful night. In his dreams he beheld the bodies of the dead floating upon the Seine, and heard their agonizing cries. Anjou-Henry III-more guilty than he, mounted the throne. But Guise, his rival, the idol of the League, stole away the hearts of the people. He enjoyed the reality of power, and there was danger that he might get the crown too. On the 23d of September, 1588, in the chateau of Blois, where the Estates were assembled, Henry of Guise was invited to the cabinet of the King. As he crossed the threshhold, by the order of Henry III. he was stabbed and thrown down by men belonging to the King's body-guard, and after a short but desperate resistance, was killed at the foot of the King's bed. The Cardinal of Lorraine, the brother of Guise, was seized and executed. The Cardinal of Bourbon was placed under arrest. Catherine de Medici was at this time laboring under a mortal illness. Her son had renounced her counsels, power had slipped from her hands, and she had become an object of general aversion and contempt. Her apartment was directly under that in which Guise had been struck down, and the sounds of the deadly struggle reached her ears. When she learned what had occurred, she saw that the murder boded no good to the King. She rallied her strength and visited the Cardinal of Bourbon. He charged everything upon her; she could not rest, he told her, until she had brought all to the slaughter. In this scene, pale and haggard,-like the wife of Macbeth, "troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from her rest "--she appears on the stage for the last time. In full view of the danger that impended over her son, and of the ruin of her house, she expired. Soon Henry III. was obliged to fly from the anathemas of the Sorbonne, and the wrath of the League, to the camp of Henry IV. There, on the 1st of August, 1589, a fanatical Dominican priest, Clément, by name, came to him, pretending to have secrets of importance to communicate. The King bent his ear to listen, but was immediately heard to cry out: "Ah! the villainous Monk-he has killed me!" Clément had drawn a knife from his sleeve and buried it in his body. Henry lingered for eighteen hours; and then the last of the four principal conspirators who planned the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the last King of the line of Valois, died.

ARTICLE II.-A CHINESE HISTORICAL NOVEL.

Lieh Kwoh Chi, or The Records of the Feudal Kingdoms; with a translation of Chapters I. and II.

AMONG the fields of literary research still unexplored, and almost unknown to Western scholars, the annals of China present one of the most promising. The rulers of that empire. have distinguished themselves for their munificent and personal patronage of letters, and the efforts they have made to preserve the records of their dynasties. The digested histories of the successive families which have occupied the throne of the Hwangti, are divided into twenty-four separate works, and contain in all 3264 books or chapters. The number of their authors is twenty, of whom Sz'ma Tsien, the earliest, B. C. 163-85, has been aptly styled the Herodotus of China to indicate his lively narrative as well as his priority in date. We do not intend to describe or analyze them at all, but to merely show somewhat of the extent of this untrodden field. A critical synopsis of the historians then extant was made in the XIIth century by the famous philosopher Chu Hi, in fifty-nine chapters, under the title of The Mirror of History; the French translation of which, by Père Mailla, makes eleven quarto volumes, including, however, the annals of the succeeding three dynasties down to A. D. 1780.

In addition to the various kinds of historical writings in Chinese literature, such as dynastic histories, annals, complete records, separate histories, or mémoires pour servir, local or biographical histories, and official or documentary records or rolls, there are hundreds of authors whose works have exerted much more influence in diffusing a knowledge of their national life and prominent actors among the people. They answer very nearly to our historical novels, but it is not easy to decide, from present knowledge, in which of them fact, and in which of them fiction most prevails. The literati regard them all with much the same feeling as we might suppose Gibbon would have reviewed Old Mortality or Rienzi; and yet the insight