pardon me, and be merciful.  I know not where I am, they have made me so perplexed and agitated.  How will all this end!—­What shall I do?  I am lost for ever!  I know it.’—­Then the nurse thus addressed him:—­’Sire, be the murders on those who forced you to order them; your majesty could not help it, and since you never consented, and now regret them, believe God will never impute them to you, and will cover them with the mantle of justice of his Son, to whom alone you should look for aid.  Ah! for the honour of God, let your majesty cease from this weeping.’  Having said this, she rose for a handkerchief, for his was drenched with tears:  Charles having taken it from her, made a sign that she should retire and leave him to repose.”

The dreadful narrative of the massacre of St. Bartholomew is detailed in the history of De Thou; and the same scene is painted in glowing, though in faithful colours, by Voltaire in the Henriade.—­Charles, whose last miserable moments we come from contemplating, when he observed several fugitive Huguenots about his palace in the morning after the massacre of 30,000 of their friends, took a fowling-piece, and repeatedly fired at them.

Such was the effect of religion operating, perhaps not on a malignant, but on a feeble mind!

ROYAL PROMOTIONS.

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.

Chevreau informs us that the Sultan Osman having observed a gardener planting a cabbage with some peculiar dexterity, the manner so attracted his imperial eye that he raised him to an office near his person, and shortly afterwards he rewarded the planter of cabbages by creating him beglerbeg or viceroy of the Isle of Cyprus.

Marc Antony gave the house of a Roman citizen to a cook, who had prepared for him a good supper!  Many have been raised to extraordinary preferment by capricious monarchs for the sake of a jest.  Lewis XI. promoted a poor priest whom he found sleeping in the porch of a church, that the proverb might be verified, that to lucky men good fortune will come even when they are asleep!  Our Henry VII. made a viceroy of Ireland if not for the sake of, at least with a clench.  When the king was told that all Ireland could not rule the Earl of Kildare, he said, then shall this earl rule all Ireland.

It is recorded of Henry VIII. that he raised a servant to a considerable dignity because he had taken care to have a roasted boar prepared for him, when his majesty happened to be in the humour of feasting on one! and the title of Sugar-loaf-court, in Leadenhall-street, was probably derived from another piece of munificence of this monarch:  the widow of a Mr. Cornwallis was rewarded by the gift of a dissolved priory there situated, for some fine puddings with which she had presented his majesty!