sometimes gives. By a common consent, they resolved to suffer the last extremities rather than open their gates to an enemy who had just given a proof sufficiently striking of his ill faith and of his perfidy. While the ministers strengthened this zeal by their fanatical sermons, women, children, old men worked in emulation of each other in repairing the old fortifications and in raising new ones. They collected provisions and arms, they fitted out boats and ships; in fine, not a moment was lost in organizing and preparing every means of defense of which the city was capable. Several noblemen escaped from the massacre, joined the Rochellois, and by the picture which they drew of Saint Bartholomew, gave courage to the most timid. To men saved from a death which seemed certain, war and its dangers were as a light wind is to sailors who have just escaped a tempest.

Mergy and his companions were of the number of those refugees who came to swell the ranks of the defenders of Rochelle. The court of Paris, alarmed at these preparations, repented of not having anticipated them. The Maréchal de Biron approached Rochelle, bearer of propositions of accommodation. The king had some reasons for hoping that the choice of Biron would be agreeable to the Rochellois; for this maréchal, far from taking part in the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, had saved several Protestants of rank, and had even pointed the cannons of the arsenal, which he commanded, against the assassins who bore the royal standards.

He asked only to be received into the city, and to be there recognized in the character of governor for the king, promising to respect the privileges and franchise of the inhabitants, and to allow them the free exercise of their religion. But after the slaughter of sixty thousand Protestants, could they longer believe the promises of Charles IX. ?

Moreover, during the very course of the negotiations, the massacres went on at Bordeaux. Biron's soldiers were pillaging the territory of Rochelle, and a royal fleet seized the merchant vessels and blockaded the harbor.

The Rochellois refused to receive Biron, and replied that they could make no treaty with the king so long as he was the slave of the Guises. Whether they believed that

these latter were the sole authors of the evils that Calvinism was suffering, or whether by this fiction, afterward often repeated, they wished to reassure the conscience of those who would have believed that fidelity to their king ought to rise above the interests of their religion, thenceforth there was no means of negotiation. The king bethought himself of another nogotiator, and it was Lanoue that he sent.

Lanoue, surnamed Bras-de-fer because of an artificial arm, with which he had replaced that which he had lost in a combat, was a zealous Calvinist, who, in the last civil wars, had given proof of great valor and of military talents.

The admiral, of whom he was the friend, had never possessed a lieutenant more skillful or more devoted. At the moment of Saint Bartholomew he was in the Netherlands, heading the undisciplined bands of Flemish, in insurrection against the power of Spain.

Betrayed by fortune, he had been forced to surrender to the Duke d'Albe, who had treated him quite kindly. Afterward, and when so much bloodshed had excited some remorse, Charles IX. ransomed him, and, contrary to all expectation, received him with the greatest affability.

This prince, an extremist in everything, loaded one Protestant with caresses, and had just had the throats of a hundred thousand cut.

A kind of fatality seemed to guard the destiny of Lanoue: already he had been made prisoner in the third civil war, first at Jarnac, then at Moncontour, and always liberated without ransom by the brother of the king, despite the instigations of a part of his captains, who urged him to sacrifice a man too dangerous to be spared and too honest to be bribed. Charles thought that Lanoue would remember his clemency, and charged him to exhort the Rochellois to submission.

Lanoue accepted, but with the condition that the king should exact nothing from him which was incompatible with his honor. He set out accompanied by an Italian priest, who was to act as spy upon him.

At first he experienced the mortification of perceiving that he was distrusted. He could not be admitted into Rochelle, but they assigned to him as a place of interview a little village of the environs. It

was at Yaudon that he met the deputies from Rochelle. He knew them all, as one knows his old companions in arms; but at his appearance none extended to him a friendly hand, not one appeared to recognize him. He set forth and explained the propositions of the king. The substance of his address was : "Trust the promises of the king; civil war is the worst of evils." The mayor of Rochelle replied with a bitter smile: " We, indeed, see a man who resembles Lanoue, but Lanoue would not have proposed that his brothers should submit to assassins: Lanoue loved the late admiral, and he would have wished to avenge him rather than to treat with his murderers. No, you are not Lanoue." The unhappy embassador, whom these reproaches pierced to the soul, recounted the services which he had rendered to the cause of the Calvinists; showed his mutilated arm, and protested his devotion to his religion.

Little by little the distrust of the Rochellois wore away; their gates opened to Lanoue; they showed him their resources, and urged him to place himself at their head. The offer was very tempting to an old soldier. The oath made to Charles had been taken with a condition which he might interpret according to his conscience.

Lanoue hoped that, by placing himself at the head of the Rochellois, he should be better able to bring them to terms of peace. What was the result? The Catholics cried that he had broken his word to the king; the Protestants accused him of betraying them. In this condition, Lanoue, steeped in mortification, sought death by exposing himself twenty times a day.

The besieged had just made a quite successful sortie against the advanced works of the Catholic army. They had filled up several feet of trenches, upset some gabions, and killed a hundred soldiers.

The detachment which had gained this victory re-entered the city by the gate Yaudon.

First came Captain Dietrich with a company of arquebusiers, all with faces heated, panting, and asking for water, a certain mark that they had not spared themselves. Then came a great troop of citizens, among whom were seen several women, who seemed to have taken part in the combat. About forty prisoners folVOL. XIII.-16

lowed, the greater part covered with wounds, and placed between two files of soldiers, who had great difficulty in defending them from the fury of the people, assembled at their passage. About twenty horsemen formed the rear-guard. Lanoue, to whom Mergy served as aide-decamp, came last. His cuirass had been pierced by a ball, and his horse was wounded in two places. In his left hand he still held a discharged pistol, and by means of a hook, which protruded from his right bracelet in place of the hand, he guided the bridle of his horse.

"Permit the prisoners to pass, my friends," he cried every moment. "Be humane, good Rochellois; they are wounded; they can no longer defend themselves; they are no longer enemies."

But the populace answered him with fierce cries of, "To the gallows with the papists! to the gallows! and vive Lanoue!"

Mergy and the cavaliers, by opportunely distributing some blows with the wood of their lances, added to the effect of the generous recommendations of their general. The prisoners were at length conducted to the city prison, and placed under a good guard, where they had nothing to fear from the rage of the populace. The detachment dispersed in the city, and Lanoue, accompanied only by some noblemen, alighted before the Hotel de Ville, just as the mayor was coming out, followed by several citizens. . ... He saluted the mayor, and leaning upon the shoulder of the young man, he directed his steps toward the bastion.

Lanoue, his

They came there a moment after a cannon-ball had mortally wounded two men. The stones were all stained with blood, and one of these sufferers was crying to his comrades to kill him. elbow resting upon the parapet, looked for some time in silence at the works of the besiegers; then turning to Mergy: "War is a horrible thing," said he; "but a civil war. . . . . This ball has been put into a French cannon; it is a Frenchman who has pointed the cannon, and who just fired it; and both these whom this ball has killed are Frenchmen. to kill half a mile distant; but M. de Mergy, when one's sword must be thrust into the body of a man who cries grâce in your own tongue. . . . and now we have just done that, this very morning."

Still it is nothing

"Ah! Monsieur, if you had seen the massacres of the 24th of August! If you had passed the Seine when it was red, and when it bore more dead bodies than it drifts flakes of ice after a breaking up, you would feel less pity for the men whom we are fighting. To me, every papist is a murderer."

In

"Do not calumniate your country. this army which is besieging us there are very few of these monsters of whom you speak. The soldiers are French peasants, who have left their plows to gain the king's pay; and the noblemen and the captains fight because they have taken an oath of fidelity to the king. They are right, perhaps, and we-we are rebels."

"Rebels! Our cause is just. We are fighting for our religion and for our life."

"From what I see, you have few scruples; you are fortunate, M. de Mergy." And the old soldier sighed heavily. . . .

The bastion de l'Evangile, against which the engineers of the Catholic army had directed their efforts, suffered, above all, from a battery of five cannons, established upon a little eminence surmounted by a dilapidated building, which, before the siege, had served as a mill. A fosse, with a parapet of earth, forbade approach on the side of the city, and before the fosse several arquebusiers had been placed as sentinels. But as the Protestant captain had foreseen, their tinder, exposed for several hours to the damp, became nearly useless, and the assailants, well provided with everything, prepared for the attack, had a great advantage over men taken by surprise, fatigued by watching, drenched with rain, and benumbed with cold. The first sentinels are slain. Some arquebusades, fired by miracle, awaken the guard of the battery in time to see the Protestants already in possession of the fosse, and climbing up the knoll to the mill. A few try to resist, but their weapons fall from their hands stiffened by the cold; nearly all their arquebuses miss fire, while not a single blow of the assailants is lost. The victory is not doubtful, and already the Protestants, in possession of the battery, utter the fierce cry: No quarter! Remember the 24th of August. About fifty soldiers with their captain were lodged in the turret of the mill; the captain in his nightcap and drawers, holding a pillow in one hand and his sword in the other,

He

opens the gate, and comes out asking from whence arises all this tumult. Far from thinking of an attack of the enemy, he supposed that the noise proceeded from a quarrel among his own soldiers. was cruelly undeceived; a blow of a halberd stretched him upon the ground bathed in his blood. The soldiers had time to barricade the door of the turret, and for some time they defended themselves with advantage, by firing from the windows; but close against this building there was a great stack of straw and hay, together with the branches of trees, which were to be used in making gabions. The Protestants fired this, which in a moment enveloped the turret, and mounted to the summit. Soon lamentable cries were heard coming forth. The roof was in flames, and was about to fall upon the heads of the wretched ones whom it covered. The door was burning, and the barricades which they had made prevented escape by this passage. If they attempted to leap from the windows they fell into the flames, or else were received upon the points of the pikes. Then was a frightful spectacle witnessed. An ensign, clad in complete armor, attempted to leap, as others, from a narrow window. His cuirass terminated, according to a mode then quite common, in a shirt of steel, which covered the thighs and the stomach, and spread out like the top of a funnel, in such a manner as to permit him to walk easily. The window was not large enough to let this part of his armor pass, and the ensign, in his excitement, had thrown himself there so violently, that the greater part of his body was outside without power to move, and fastened as in a vice. Meanwhile the flames mount up to him, heat his armor, and burn him there slowly, as in a furnace, or in that famous brazen ox invented by Phalaris. The wretched man uttered terrible shrieks, and vainly waved his arms as if asking assistance. There was a moment of silence among the assailants, then altogether, and as by common accord, they sent forth a war-cry to divert their thoughts, that the moans of the burning man might not be heard. He disappeared in a whirlwind of flames and of smoke, and there was seen falling, amid the ruins of the tower, a helmet red and smoking.

In the midst of battle, sensations of horror and sorrow are of short duration.

MORE

ULRICH VON HUTTEN.

ORE than three centuries have rolled away since a noble Franconian knight was buried in the green island of Uffnau, which lies at the extremity of the Lake of Zurich, almost within the shadow of the lofty Alps. That knight was Ulrich von Hütten, who died at the early age of thirty-six, forsaken by his friends, persecuted, destitute; but who, in the course of his short and brilliant career, did more than any man of his time, with the single exception of Luther, to liberate Germany from the tyranny of the Papal yoke. He also took a prominent part in forwarding the cause of classical learning, and in emancipating the world of mind from the iron bondage in which it had for ages been bound by the false teaching and useless subtleties of the scholastic system. All this he did, in spite of poverty, persecution, and disease, by the power of his eloquent and spirit-stirring writings, which, in a literary point of view, are honorable to the age in which they appeared; which proproduced an unparalleled effect upon the German mind, and which, even at the present day, are deeply interesting, not only as exhibiting noble and liberal views of politics and religion far in advance of their age, and as containing the most cutting and effective satires that have ever been penned against the vices and corrup- | tions of the monastic system and of the court of Rome, but also as presenting the most vivid and faithful pictures of the age in which they appeared, in its varied forms of life and action.

As the very name of Ulrich von Hütten is far less generally known in this country than it deserves to be, and as his works are but little read, we propose, in the present article, to present our readers with a sketch of his life, and a brief account of some of his most celebrated writings.

The subject is one of great interest, for few historical characters exhibit more originality than that of Hütten. One of

tion, he unites in himself some of their noblest features. Born at a crisis wher the European mind, stirred to its foundations, was straining after a freer and nobler life, but a life as yet imperfectly con ceived and comprehended, he became one of the most energetic exponents of the wants and aspirations of his time, and one of the most powerful agents in giving these aspirations a definite form, and removing the obstacles that prevented their fulfillment. A worthy fellow-worker with Luther, he seconded him in all his efforts for religious freedom; inspired with the warmest and most disinterested love of liberty, he was, throughout life, her most eloquent defender, and at last died a martyr in her cause. Seldom, indeed, has she had a nobler champion; he offered her no mere lip-homage, but acts, and those burning words that rouse others to action. His exertions were unceasing, his activity of thought prodigious, and his productiveness no less remarkable. During his short life he composed not fewer than fifty separate works, one of which still ranks as the national satire of Germany. Among them are editions of the classics, treatises on a variety of subjects, many of them poetical, orations, and letters.

Most of them, however, are satires. Satire and invective were, indeed, at that time the prevalent modes of writing in Germany, as a glance at the literature of the age will show, and Hütten was led to adopt them, both by the force of circumstances, and by the character of his genius. He pursued them with his usual impetuosity and ardor, and is often to blame for his violence and want of delicacy; but, in spite of these faults, which, indeed, deform the writings of the greatest men of that age, we are always obliged to admire his zeal for truth, his profound detestation of hypocrisy, and his ardent love for liberty and for his native country.

Ulrich von Hütten was born on the 21st of April, 1488, at the family Château of Steckelberg in Franconia. From the tenth century his ancestors had borne an honorable name in council and in war, and held a high place among that Franconian nobility which was regarded as the most perfect type of German chivalry. Ulrich's birthplace was one of those feudal residences of which he has left us the following vivid description:

Our chateaux are constructed not for pleasure, but security. All is sacrificed to the necessity of defense. They are inclosed within ramparts and ditches; guard-rooms and stables usurp the place of apartments. Everywhere the smell of powder, of horses, of cattle, the noise of dogs and oxen; and, upon the skirts of the great forests that surround us, the howling of wolves. Perpetual agitation; constant coming and going; while our gates, open to all, frequently admit cut-throats, assassins, and thieves. Each day brings a new anxiety. If we maintain our independence, we run the risk of being crushed by two powerful enemies; if we put ourselves under the protection of some prince, we are forced to espouse all his quarrels. We cannot sally forth without an escort. To go to the chase, to pay a visit to a neighbor, we must put casque on head and cuirass on breast. Always, everywhere war.

Some leagues from the Château of Steckelberg stood the Abbey of Fulda, an ancient monastic institution founded under the auspices of Charlemagne in the beginning of the ninth century. Its school was famous; and to it Ulrich was sent when eleven years of age. He was the eldest of four children, but being of feeble constitution and delicate frame, his parents imagined that he would find the Church an easier road to preferment than the army. At Fulda Hütten applied himself, with characteristic ardor, especially to the study of the classical tongues; but for a monastic life he showed no vocation, and was encouraged in his dislike to it by his fellow-pupil Crotus Rubianus, and by Ethelwolf von Stein, who proved a powerful and steady friend. All the representations of the latter, however, to the parents of Hütten were ineffectual; for the abbot of Fulda had discovered the splendid abilities of the youthful student, and wished to enlist them in the service of the Church. The result was, that finding it impossible to submit to the wishes of his parents and the abbot, Hütten fled from Fulda, and, at the age of sixteen, threw himself upon the world to fight the great battle of life. For a long time after this period he was dead to his family, his father taking no notice of him, and contributing nothing to his support.

Hütten's studies. He soon, however, tired of the fruitless subtleties and logical quibbles of the schoolmen, and betook himself to the more congenial study of the classics. He was the assiduous and favorite pupil of Ragius Esticampius, who, in the face of the old system, taught with the greatest success the new science of the ancient languages and literature. The time was fast approaching when the huthe fetters of scholasticism; and, as a man mind was to emancipate itself from preparation for the coming struggle for freedom and progress, the models of classic antiquity were eagerly studied. A great literary movement had been gradually developing itself in Germany from the beginning of the sixteenth century. In 1503 a society was formed on the borders of the Rhine, under the name of "Sodalitas Litteraria Rhenana," and met with great encouragement from the fostering patronage of the princes of the Palatinate. Its members did much to forward the good cause; but the old system was not to be overthrown without a struggle, and in Germany the universities proved themselves the most strenuous supporters of the cause of ignorance, and the most bitter persecutors of the partisans of the new teaching. Like the accusers of Socrates, like the upholders of all ancient abuses, the theologians of Cologne brought against Ragius the accusation of being an innovator, and a corrupter of youth, and expelled him from their university; upon which he betook himself to Frankfort, where the Margrave of Brandenberg was about to found a university, and there he was speedily followed by Hütten, who was received as one of the earliest masters, and repaid his reception by his first poem.

From 1506 to 1514 Hütten only appears at long intervals. He seems to have traveled extensively in order to add to his knowledge, visiting Bohemia, Moravia, Vienna, and many other parts of the north of Europe. During these travels, undertaken almost without resources, he frequently suffered much distress and hardship. On the Baltic he was exposed

Pomerania he was plundered of his baggage. Occasionally, however, the charms of his conversation procured him a flattering reception, as at Olmutz, where the bishop, after having hospitably entertained him for several days, gave him at his de