In fact, it is to this attitude
of listening expectation in the king, and breathless waiting for the
blow, that Schiller alludes in that fine speech of Wallenstein to his
sister, where he notices the funeral knells that sounded continually in
Henry's ears, and, above all, his prophetic instinct, that caught the
sound from a far distance of his murderer's motions, and could
distinguish, amidst all the tumult of a mighty capital, those stealthy
steps
----'Which even then were seeking him
Throughout the streets of Paris.'
We profess not to admire Henry the Fourth of France, whose secret
character we shall, on some other occasion, attempt to expose. But his
resignation to the appointments of Heaven, in dismissing his guards, as
feeling that against a danger so domestic and so mysterious, all
fleshly arms were vain, has always struck us as the most like
magnanimity of anything in his very theatrical life.
Passing to our own country, and to the times immediately in succession,
we fall upon some striking prophecies, not verbal but symbolic, if we
turn from the broad highway of public histories, to the by-paths of
private memories. Either Clarendon it is, in his Life (not his public
history), or else Laud, who mentions an anecdote connected with the
coronation of Charles I.
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