It was the increasing preponderance of the Guises, at court as well as in the country, which caused the two princes to take this sudden resolution.  Since Henry III.’s coming to the throne, war had gone on between the Catholics and the Protestants, but languidly and with frequent suspensions through local and shortlived truces.  The king and the queen-mother would have been very glad that the St. Bartholomew should be short-lived also, as a necessary but transitory crisis; it had rid them of their most formidable adversaries, Coligny and the Reformers of note who were about him.  Henry and Catherine aspired to no more than resuming their policy of manoeuvring and wavering between the two parties engaged in the struggle; but it was not for so poor a result that the ardent Catholics had committed the crime of the St. Bartholomew; they promised themselves from it the decisive victory of their church and of their supremacy.  Henry de Guise came forward as their leader in this grand design; there are to be read, beneath a portrait of him done in the sixteenth century, these verses, also of that date:—­

               “The virtue, greatness, wisdom from on high,
               Of yonder duke, triumphant far and near,
               Do make bad men to shrink with coward fear,
               And God’s own Catholic church to fructify. 
               In armor clad, like maddened Mars he moves;
               The trembling Huguenot cowers at his glance;
               A prop for holy church is his good lance;
               His eye is ever mild to those he loves.”

Guise cultivated very carefully this ardent confidence on the part of Catholic France; he recommended to his partisans attention to little pious and popular practices.  “I send you some paternosters [meaning, in the plural, the beads of a chaplet, or the chaplet entire],” he wrote to his wife, Catherine of Cleves; “you will have strings made for them and string them together.  I don’t know whether you dare offer some of them to the queens and to my lady mother.  Ask advice of Mesdames de Retz and de Villeroy about it.”  The flight and insurrection of the Duke of Anjou and the King of Navarre furnished the Duke of Guise with a very natural occasion for re-engaging in the great struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, wherein the chief part belonged to him.  Let us recur, for a moment, to the origin of that struggle and the part taken in it, at the outset, by the princes of the house of Lorraine.  “As early as the year 1562, twenty-six years before the affair of the barricades,” says M. Vitet in the excellent introduction which he has put at the head of his beautiful historic dramas from the last half of the sixteenth century, “Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, being at the Council of Trent, conceived the plan of a Holy League, or association of Catholics, which was to have the triple object of defending, by armed force, the Romish church in France, of obtaining for the cardinal’s