[Footnote 285:  The miracles of Clovis consisted of a shield, which was picked up after having fallen from the skies; the anointing oil, conveyed from heaven by a white dove in a phial, which, till the reign of Louis XVI. consecrated the kings of France; and the oriflamme, or standard with golden flames, long suspended over the tomb of St. Denis, which the French kings only raised over the tomb when their crown was in imminent peril.  No future king of France can be anointed with the sainte ampoule, or oil brought down to earth by a white dove; in 1794 it was broken by some profane hand, and antiquaries have since agreed that it was only an ancient lachrymatory!]

[Footnote 286:  This fact was probably quite unknown to us, till it was given in the “Quarterly Review,” vol. xxix.  However, the same event was going on in Italy.]

[Footnote 287:  One of the most absurd reports that ever frightened private society was that which prevailed in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century.  It was, that the Jesuits used a poisoned snuff which they gave to their opponents, with the fashionable politeness of the day in “offering a pinch;” and which for a time deterred the custom.]

[Footnote 288:  It is now about thirty-seven years ago since I first published this anecdote; at the same time I received information that our female historian and dilapidator had acted in this manner more than once.  At that distance of time this rumour, so notorious at the British Museum, it was impossible to authenticate.  The Rev. William Graham, the surviving husband of Mrs. Macaulay, intemperately called on Dr. Morton, in a very advanced period of life, to declare that “it appeared to him that the note does not contain any evidence that the leaves were torn out by Mrs. Macaulay.”  It was more apparent to the unprejudiced that the doctor must have singularly lost the use of his memory, when he could not explain his own official note, which, perhaps, at the time he was compelled to insert.  Dr. Morton was not unfriendly to Mrs. Macaulay’s political party; he was the editor of Whitelocke’s “Diary of his Embassy to the Queen of Sweden,” and has, I believe, largely castrated the work.  The original lies at the British Museum.]

[Footnote 289:  There was one passage he recollected:—­

                            Just left my bed
    A lifeless trunk, and scarce a dreaming head!

]

[Footnote 290:  I have seen a transcript, by the favour of a gentleman who sent it to me, of Gray’s “Directions for Heading History.”  It had its merit, at a time when our best histories had not been published, but it is entirely superseded by the admirable “Methode” of Lenglet du Fresnoy.]

[Footnote 291:  Henry Stephen appears first to have started this subject of parody; his researches have been borrowed by the Abbe Sallier, to whom, in my turn, I am occasionally indebted.  His little dissertation is in the French Academy’s “Memoires,” tome vii. 398.]