our brother of Burgundy have a mind to undertake it; for, above all things, I conjure you not to have any dissension with him.  If that should happen God preserve you from it! —­the affairs of this kingdom, which seem well advanced for us, would become bad.”  As soon as he had done with politics he bade his doctors tell him how long he had still to live.  One of them knelt down before his bed and said, “Sir, be thinking of your soul; it seemeth to us that, saving the divine mercy, you have not more than two hours.”  The king summoned his confessor with the priests, and asked to have recited to him the penitential psalms.  When they came to the twentieth versicle of the Miserere,—­Ut oedificentur muri Hierusalem (that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up),—­He made them stop.  “Ah!” said he, “if God had been pleased to let me live out my time, I would, after putting an end to the war in France, reducing the dauphin to submission or driving him out of the kingdom in which I would have established a sound peace, have gone to conquer Jerusalem.  The wars I have undertaken have had the approval of all the proper men and of the most holy personages; I commenced them and have prosecuted them without offence to God or peril to my soul.”  These were his last words.  The chanting of the psalms was resumed around him, and he expired on the 31st of August, 1422, at the age of thirty-four.  A great soul and a great king; but a great example also of the boundless errors which may be fallen into by the greatest men when they pursue with arrogant confidence their own views, forgetting the laws of justice and the rights of other men.

On the 22d of October, 1422, less than two months after the death of Henry V., Charles VI., King of France, died at Paris in the forty-third year of his reign.  As soon as he had been buried at St. Denis, the Duke of Bedford, regent of France according to the will of Henry V., caused a herald to proclaim, “Long live Henry of Lancaster, King of England and of France!” The people’s voice made very different proclamation.  It had always been said that the public evils proceeded from the state of illness into which the unhappy King Charles had fallen.  The goodness he had given glimpses of in his lucid intervals had made him an object of tender pity.  Some weeks yet before his death, when he had entered Paris again, the inhabitants, in the midst of their sufferings and under the harsh government of the English, had seen with joy their poor mad king coming back amongst them, and had greeted him with thousand-fold shouts of “Noel!” His body lay in state for three days, with the face uncovered, in a hall of the hostel of St. Paul, and the multitude went thither to pray for him, saying, “Ah! dear prince, never shall we have any so good as thou Wert; never shall we see thee more.  Accursed be thy death!  Since thou dost leave us, we shall never have aught but wars and troubles.  As for thee, thou goest to thy rest; as for us, we remain in tribulation and sorrow.  We seem made to fall into the same distress as the children of Israel during the captivity in Babylon.”