I have observed the affectation which for many years past has prevailed in Paris, even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the memory of your Henry the Fourth.  If anything could put any one out of humor with that ornament to the kingly character, it would be this overdone style of insidious panegyric.  The persons who have worked this engine the most busily are those who have ended their panegyrics in dethroning his successor and descendant:  a man as good-natured, at the least, as Henry the Fourth; altogether as fond of his people; and who has done infinitely more to correct the ancient vices of the state than that great monarch did, or we are sure he ever meant to do.  Well it is for his panegyrists that they have not him to deal with!  For Henry of Navarre was a resolute, active, and politic prince.  He possessed, indeed, great humanity and mildness, but an humanity and mildness that never stood in the way of his interests.  He never sought to be loved without putting himself first in a condition to be feared.  He used soft language with determined conduct.  He asserted and maintained his authority in the gross, and distributed his acts of concession only in the detail.  Ho spent the income of his prerogative nobly, but he took care not to break in upon the capital,—­never abandoning for a moment any of the claims which he made under the fundamental laws, nor sparing to shed the blood of those who opposed him, often in the field, sometimes upon the scaffold.  Because he knew how to make his virtues respected by the ungrateful, he has merited the praises of those whom, if they had lived in his time, he would have shut up in the Bastile, and brought to punishment along with the regicides whom he hanged after he had famished Paris into a surrender.

If these panegyrists are in earnest in their admiration of Henry the Fourth, they must remember that they cannot think more highly of him than he did of the noblesse of France,—­whose virtue, honor, courage, patriotism, and loyalty were his constant theme.

But the nobility of France are degenerated since the days of Henry the Fourth.—­This is possible; but it is more than I can believe to be true in any great degree.  I do not pretend to know France as correctly as some others; but I have endeavored through my whole life to make myself acquainted with human nature,—­otherwise I should be unfit to take even my humble part in the service of mankind.  In that study I could not pass by a vast portion of our nature as it appeared modified in a country but twenty-four miles from the shore of this island.  On my best observation, compared with my best inquiries, I found your nobility for the greater part composed of men of a high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honor, both with regard to themselves individually, and with regard to their whole corps, over whom they kept, beyond what is common in other countries, a censorial eye.  They were tolerably well bred; very officious, humane, and hospitable; in their conversation frank and open; with a good military tone; and reasonably tinctured with literature, particularly of the authors in their own language.  Many had pretensions far above this description.  I speak of those who were generally met with.