To the last of his days Louis XII. was animated by earnest sympathy and active solicitude for his people.  It cost him a great deal to make with the King of England the treaties of August 7, 1514, to cede Tournai to the English, and to agree to the payment to them of a hundred thousand crowns a year for ten years.  He did it to restore peace to France, attacked on her own soil, and feeling her prosperity threatened.  For the same reason he negotiated with Pope Leo X., Emperor Maximilian, and Ferdinand the Catholic, and he had very nearly attained the same end by entering once more upon pacific relations with them, when death came and struck him down at the age of fifty-three.  He died sorrowing over the concessions he had made from a patriotic sense of duty as much as from necessity, and full of disquietude about the future.  He felt a sincere affection for Francis de Valois, Count of Angouleme, his son-law and successor; the marriage between his daughter Claude and that prince had been the chief and most difficult affair connected with his domestic life; and it was only after the death of the queen, Anne of Brittany, that he had it proclaimed and celebrated.  The bravery, the brilliant parts, the amiable character, and the easy grace of Francis I. delighted him, but he dreaded his presumptuous inexperience, his reckless levity, and his ruinous extravagance; and in his anxiety as a king and father he said, “We are laboring in vain; this big boy will spoil everything for us.”

END OF THE THIRD VOLUME.