This king's son, Henry the
Second, read some years _before_ the event a description of that
tournament, on the marriage of the Scottish Queen with his eldest son,
Francis II., which proved fatal to himself, through the awkwardness of
the Compte de Montgomery and his own obstinacy. After this, and we
believe a little after the brief reign of Francis II., arose
Nostradamus, the great prophet of the age. All the children of Henry
II. and of Catharine de Medici, one after the other, died in
circumstances of suffering and horror, and Nostradamus pursued the
whole with ominous allusions. Charles IX., though the authorizer of the
Bartholomew massacre, was the least guilty of his party, and the only
one who manifested a dreadful remorse. Henry III., the last of the
brothers, died, as the reader will remember, by assassination. And all
these tragic successions of events are still to be read more or less
dimly prefigured in verses of which we will not here discuss the dates.
Suffice it, that many authentic historians attest the good faith of the
prophets; and finally, with respect to the first of the Bourbon
dynasty, Henry IV., who succeeded upon the assassination of his
brother-in-law, we have the peremptory assurance of Sully and other
Protestants, countersigned by writers both historical and
controversial, that not only was he prepared, by many warnings, for his
own tragical death--not only was the day, the hour prefixed--not only
was an almanac sent to him, in which the bloody summer's day of 1610
was pointed out to his attention in bloody colors; but the mere record
of the king's last afternoon shows beyond a doubt the extent and the
punctual limitation of his anxieties.
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