having found himself driven from place to place by Ferdinand II., who by degrees recovered possession of nearly all his kingdom, merely, himself also, to die there on the 6th of October, leaving for his uncle and successor, Frederick III., the honor of recovering the last four places held by the French.  Charles ordered a fresh army of invasion to be formed, and the Duke of Orleans was singled out to command it; but he evaded this commission.  The young dauphin, Charles Orlando, three years old, had just died, “a fine child and bold of speech,” says Commynes, “and one that feared not the things that other children are wont to fear.”  Duke Louis of Orleans, having thus become heir to the throne, did not care to go and run risks at a distance.  He, nevertheless, declared his readiness to obey an express command from the king if the title of lieutenant-general were given him; but “I will never send him to war on compulsion,” said Charles, and nothing more was said about it.  Whilst still constantly talking of the war he had in view, Charles attended more often and more earnestly than he hitherto had to the internal affairs of his kingdom.  “He had gotten it into his head,” says Commynes, “that he would fain live according to God’s commandments, and set justice and the Church in good order.  He would also revise his finances, in such sort as to levy on the people but twelve hundred thousand francs, and that in form of talliage, besides his own property on which he would live, as did the kings of old.”  His two immediate predecessors, Charles VII. and Louis IX., had decreed the collation and revision of local customs, so often the rule of civil jurisdiction; but the work made no progress:  Charles VIII., by a decree dated March 15, 1497, abridged the formalities, and urged on the execution of it, though it was not completed until the reign of Charles IX.  By another decree, dated August 2, 1497, he organized and regulated, as to its powers as well as its composition, the king’s grand council, the supreme administrative body, which was a fixture at Paris.  He began even to contemplate a reformation of his own life; he had inquiries made as to how St. Louis used to proceed in giving audience to the lower orders; his intention, he said, was to henceforth follow the footsteps of the most justice-loving of French kings.  “He set up,” says Commynes, “a public audience, whereat he gave ear to everybody, and especially to the poor; I saw him thereat, a week before his death, for two good hours, and I never saw him again.  He did not much business at this audience; but at least it was enough to keep folks in awe, and especially his own officers, of whom he had suspended some for extortion.”  It is but too often a man’s fate to have his life slip from him just as he was beginning to make a better use of it.  On the 7th of April, 1498, Charles VIII. was pleased, after dinner, to go down with the queen into the fosses of the castle of Amboise, to