his terror, he despatched his creature, the Abbé de la Rivière, with letters to Richelieu, owning his guilt, and offering a complete revelation. The cardinal answered, that plenary confession had a right to absolution both from God and man. Gaston, overjoyed, replied by a detailed accusation of his accomplices. He exaggerated the facts, and even invented imaginary details. In his first panic, he had burnt the original of the treaty with Spain, but he was willing to swear to its contents.

Furnished with this important testimony, Richelieu left Tarascon, on the 17th August, for Lyons.

A few years back there was exhibited in Pall Mall one of Delaroche's fine small pictures, representing the attenuated form. of the cardinal, wrapped in his scarlet robes (an appropriate livery for the bloody work he had in hand), reclining on a bed in his gorgeous barge, and towing after him De Thou. The funeral cortège slowly ascended the river, and did not reach Lyons till the 3d of September.

The trial lasted ten days. As usual, the penalty was paid by the inferiors. The Duc de Bouillon escaped by sacrificing Sédan, and Gaston by his base perfidy. However, no persuasions on the part of Richelieu could induce him to confront his associates.

Sentence of death was pronounced upon Cinq Mars and De Thou on the 12th, and executed in the afternoon of the same day. It is said that Louis XIII. drew out his watch at the hour of his favourite's death, and said, "Cher ami doit faire à cette heure-ci une vilaine grimace."

The piety, the chivalrous bearing, and the courage of Cinq Mars and De Thou, during the trial and on the scaffold, blinded the world as to their real guilt. A sort of halo of martyrdom was cast around them. Four or five miles above Tours, on one of the finest reaches of the Loire, stands a castle, still perfect, except that its towers end abruptly, without battlements, a few feet above the curtain. This is the château of Cinq Mars, its towers "razées à la hauteur de l'infamie."

Richelieu left Lyons for Paris immediately after the trial. He could not bear the motion of a carriage. He performed the journey, which lasted five weeks, either by water or in a magnificent litter, fitted up with red damask, containing his bed, a table, and a chair for an occasional visitor. It was carried by relays of eighteen guards. The walls of cities had to be broken down to admit of its passage, and scaffoldings were erected to raise this vast machine to a level with the apartments which were honoured by the occupation of the cardinal-king. On the 17th October he reached Paris, was received with almost royal honours, and immediately retired to Ruel.

1

Richelieu had indeed reason to triumph. Every day brought tidings of the success of his vast combinations. In the north, and in the Low Countries, the Spanish army was held in check by the Count d'Harcourt and Marshal Guébriant. The princes of the north of Italy, that beautiful land, whose destiny has long been to be torn in pieces by the pretenders to her favour, rejected the continual oppression and interference of the House from which their country was to suffer so much in future ages, and formed an alliance with Savoy and with France. The allies took Tortona on the 25th of November, and thus obtained possession of the Milanais south of the Po. The sovereignty of the province was awarded to Prince Thomas of Savoy, who held it in fief from the crown of France.

In Germany, Torstenson, the last of the successors of Gustavus, drove the Austrians out of Silesia, and a great part of Moravia; and on the 2d November was fought a second battle of Leipsic, as glorious to Sweden as the first. Reinforced by Guébriant, the Swedes subdued nearly the whole of Saxony.

The war in the Pyrenees, the chief object of Richelieu's solicitude, was brought to a successful termination. Both Rousillon and Catalonia became provinces of France. All this glory and power could not give peace of mind to the dying statesman. Since the execution of Cinq Mars, he felt that the king hated him. He dreaded, not the death which was advancing towards him with giant strides, but the knife of the assassin. Ignorant and yet suspicious of the part taken by the king in the late conspiracy, it was Louis XIII. whom he chiefly feared. On the rare occasions when the king visited him, the apartment was filled by his guards, who retained their arms; an unheard-of insult to royalty. He did not yet feel himself safe. He insisted upon the banishment of three of the king's favourite attendantsMessrs. Tilladet, De la Salle, and Desessart, officers of the Royal Guard. Louis XIII resisted long, but in vain, with this consolation, that their pretended disgrace would not last long, as the cardinal's days were numbered.

He

To lookers-on it seemed, however, an even chance which should precede the other to the tomb. The king's health was failing fast; Richelieu by no means despaired of recovery. returned to Paris, and on the 15th of November he gave a dramatic entertainment, at which, however, he was not able to be present. The piece, an allegorical tragi-comedy in five acts, was called Europa. In it "Ibère" and "Francion" dispute the hand of the princess Europa," and it ends with the triumph of "Francion."

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On the 28th Richelieu was attacked by violent fever, and spitting of blood. The symptoms increased. On the 2d Decem

ber his life was despaired of. Public prayers were put up in all the churches, and the king had a long conference with the minister to whom he owed so much. After asking the king's protection for his family and descendants, he advised him as to his future policy, recommended Mazarin as his successor, and composed with him an act, afterwards registered by the parliament, which, after recapitulating the various conspiracies in which Gaston had been engaged, excluded him for ever from any share in the government or in the regency, in the event of the king's death.

After the king's departure, Richelieu asked the physicians how long he had to live. Wishing to flatter him, they replied, that "God would work a miracle sooner than suffer the extinction of one who was so necessary to the welfare of France." His niece, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, running in, exclaimed, "Sir, you will not die: a holy woman, a Carmelite nun, has received the revelation." "My dear," he said, "we must laugh at all that; we must believe only in the Gospel ;" and turning to the physician nearest to him, "Speak to me," he said, "not as a doctor, but as a friend." Monseigneur," was the reply, "in twenty-four hours you will be dead or cured." "That is speaking out," said Richelieu; "I understand you."

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"Here is my

The sacrament was then administered to him. judge," he said, when the consecrated wafer was presented to him,-"my judge, who will soon pronounce my sentence. May he condemn me if, in the course of my ministry, I have had any other aim than the good of the Church and of the State." "Do you forgive your enemies?" said the priest. "I have had none but those of the State," was the reply.

The symptoms continued to increase. He bore them with admirable patience and fortitude. He gave way but for an instant, when bidding adieu to his niece," the being," to use his own words," whom he had most loved on earth." All around were weeping; for the terrible minister was, by the testimony of his contemporaries, the best master, kinsman, and friend that ever existed.

He preserved the same composure throughout his long agony, which lasted till towards noon on the 4th of December, when, with one deep sigh, his great soul left the wreck of what had been its tenement on earth.

The king whose reign he had made glorious, the people whom he had raised to supremacy, alike were relieved by his death.

Richelieu had trampled on his contemporaries. He could not, therefore, be judged fairly by them. It required the calm estimation of later ages to place him unrivalled as he now stands

among statesmen. Since the days of Charlemagne till the advent of Henri IV., France had been retrograding in the scale of civilised nations. The great king died before he could accomplish any effectual reform. Richelieu carried out his projects, and added to them with a firmer hand and a more enlightened capacity.

He extended the country to its natural limits by his systematic conquest. He improved the army, created the fleet, encouraged commerce, gave the first impulse to the arts, fixed the language by founding the celebrated Académie Française, protected literature, and quelled for a time the intolerable tyranny of the nobles. For all these benefits France has to thank him. But such complete changes could not have been made so suddenly without despotism and centralisation; and from these evils she is suffering now.

It was a system of government dependent on its head; and what head could be found to replace its author?

ART. IV. THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN.

Histoire du Merveilleux dans les temps modernes. Par Louis Figuier. 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1860.

THE history of human error, if such a book could be written with any approach to completeness, would probably be the most instructive work existing in any language. A Khalif Omar would be justified in destroying a Serapeion of volumes, if it were preserved. It would be an exposition of all human science: for since the apprehension of opposites is the same, to recognise error as such is to be possessed of the truth from which that error is a departure. It would also be a record of the gradual steps by which men have learned that which they now know. For, according to the saying of a French philosopher, no true hypothesis was ever yet established on any subject until all possible false hypotheses had been suggested, tried, and found wanting. These false hypotheses, therefore, arranged in chronological succession, would show us the slight element of reality contained in the earliest and most imperfect of them, becoming greater and greater, and the error associated with it less and less, as time advanced, and thought exercised itself on the problem to be solved.

But although, in certain departments, a gradual, steady increase of discovered truth, and relative diminution of ignorance and mistake, are observable in the past, and may be confidently predicted for the future, in others the pretence that we are wiser than our fathers seems to be a very groundless boast. We must distinguish the theoretic errors of philosophers, which have their basis in false intellectual assumption or inadequate induction, from the follies and delusions which appear at intervals like epidemics, fastening on the weaker minds as physical epidemics do on the frailer physical constitutions within their range. The former are but the miscalculations of a fallible judgment, which observation and experience are sure to correct, and which once refuted are refuted for ever. The latter bear resemblance rather to the hallucinations of the insane. They spring from vitiated perceptive powers. The experience which should refute them is itself perverted. The study of this latter class of errors is purely melancholy and humiliating. It is, however, instructive, and at the present time seasonable. The very aberrations of the human mind obey a law. Our nature being the same, and the experience to which it is subjected in its main features the same in all ages, since similar causes, acting under similar conditions, will produce similar results, the delusions into which men fall, generation after generation, will be in substance identical, in outward seeming only different. This fact may be turned to practical account. Madmen who were deemed incurable have been known to be restored to their right senses by being shown the same folly possessing the mind and influencing the conduct of a fellow-patient; they have learned to see themselves, as it were, in others:

"For speculation turns not to itself

Till it is travelled, and is married there
Where it may see itself."

In the same way, the present generation may derive benefit from witnessing in the follies and delusions of past ages the counterpart of its own imagined insight and discoveries. Tableturners and spirit-rappers, to whom Faraday or Sir Henry Holland would address themselves in vain, may be converted by M. Figuier. Of course, an opposite result may ensue, and no doubt will do so in many instances. Instead of past superstitions discrediting those of the present time, present superstitions will accredit the past. Heathen oracles and miracles, mediaval tales of sorcery and diabolic possession, will be resuscitated, and appealed to as illustrating, not the credulity or absurdity, but the depth of spiritual discernment that characterised the pagan and dark ages. People who believe that Mr. John Quincy Adams,