nation took a share in it or sympathized with it, and armed in a body to attack the Huguenots, who were held to be strangers and enemies. St. Bartholomew was, in short, a national uprising, like that of the Spaniards in 1809; and the citizens of Paris, when they cut the throats of the heretics, had a firm belief that they were obeying the voice of heaven.
It is no part of the business of a teller of tales like myself to give in this volume a précis of the historical incidents of 1572, but as I have mentioned St. Bartholomew I cannot refrain from setting forth certain thoughts that have occurred to me as I read this bloody page of our history. Have the causes which brought about the massacre been well understood? Was it long premeditated, or was it not rather the result of a sudden resolve, even of a chance? No historian supplies me with satisfactory answers to any of these questions. They all admit as evidence mere street rumours and alleged conversations, of very small weight in deciding a historical question of such importance. Some of them represent Charles IX. as a prodigy of dissimulation; others as a man of hasty, violent, and fantastic temper. If, long before the 24th of August, he broke out into threats against the Protestants, it is proof that he had long been medi-
