fresh edicts; a special chamber was appointed and chosen amongst the Parliament of Paris, which was to have sole cognizance of crimes and offences against the Catholic religion.  A proclamation of the new king, Francis II., ordained that houses in which assemblies of Reformers took place should be razed and demolished.  It was death to the promoters of “unlawful assemblies for purposes of religion or for any other cause.”  Another royal act provided that all persons, even relatives, who received amongst them any one condemned for heresy should seize him and bring him to justice, in default whereof they would suffer the same penalty as he.  Individual condemnations and executions abounded after these general measures; between the 2d of August and the 31st of December, 1559, eighteen persons were burned alive for open heresy, or for having refused to communicate according to the rites of the Catholic church, or go to mass, or for having hawked about forbidden books.  Finally, in December, the five councillors of the Parliament of Paris, whom, six months previously, Henry II. had ordered to be arrested and shut up in the Bastille, were dragged from prison and brought to trial.  The chief of them, Anne Dubourg, nephew of Anthony Dubourg, Chancellor of France under Francis I., defended himself with pious and patriotic persistency, being determined to exhaust all points of law and all the chances of justice he could hope for without betraying his faith.  Everything shows that he had nothing to hope for from his judges; one of them, the President Minard, as he was returning from the palace on the evening of December 12, 1559, was killed by a pistol-shot; the assassin could not be discovered; but the crime, naturally ascribed to some friend of Dubourg, served only to make certain and to hasten the death of the prisoner on trial.  Dubourg was condemned on the 22d of December, and heard unmoved the reading of his sentence.  “I forgive my judges,” said he; “they have judged according to their own lights, not according to the light that comes from on high.  Put out your fires, ye senators; be converted, and live happily.  Think without ceasing of God and on God.”  After these words, which were taken down by the clerk of the court, “and which I have here copied,” says De Thou, Dubourg was taken on the 23d of December, in a tumbrel to the Place de Greve.  As he mounted the ladder he was heard repeating several times, “Forsake me not, my God, for fear lest I forsake thee.”  He was strangled before he was cast into the flames (De Thou, t. iii. pp. 399-402), the sole favor his friends could obtain for him.