LINES TO S. J. PRATT, ESQ.

In answer to some elegant Verses by him to the Author, on his having pleaded the infirmities of age for not writing some Verses at Mr. Pratt's request.

ALAS! dear Sir, you're very kind!
You say, though almost deaf and blind,
Of sight and hearing half bereft,
My mental vigour still is left;

But while you'd contradict my senses,
My feeling stronger light dispenses,
And spite of all your florid diction,
Poets I find will deal in fiction;

Yet though I think your praise invention,
I thank you for your
kind intention..

You tell me too I still am young,
Nor are you, Sir, entirely wrong;
If follies are of youth the test,
This obvious truth must be confest;
In this respect I'm still a child,
By every youthful whim beguil'd:
The lovely sex I still admire ;
But ah! what hopes can they inspire?
Love books-I ne'er can read, I fear;
Love music-which I cannot hear;
Love pictures-which I cannot see;
What greater follies can there be?
But ev'ry scruple to remove,

These dogg'rel rhymes the fact would prove.

I'm also twice a man you say,
Not twice a child-ah lack a-day!
I never was, say what you can,
But little more than half a man;
And now, by age and grief worn out,
I still am twice a man, no doubt !
And that my faculties decay,
I feel, alas! each fleeting day:
In short, if still you will dispute,
These rhymes your argument confute;
Which, 'midst the slumbers of the night,
By you solicited, I write.

I'm hastening fast to ninety-one,
And ('tis full time) my work is done,
And hourly now, I keep in view
My latter end.-Dear sir, adieu!

Claverton, April 2, 1804.

R. G.

HISTORICAL ANECDOTES OF CATHERINE DE MEDICIS..

"Mangled peace!

Dear nurse of arts, plenty, and joyful births!
Alas! she has from France to long been chased;
And all her husbandry doth lie in heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility."

SHAKSPEARE,

FOR thirty years Catherine de Medicis governed France under the nominal sovereignty of her three sons, Francis II. Charles IX. and Henry III.

"Il faut diviser pour regner," was the darling maxim by which the wily Catherine directed her political life and the increasing influence of the Hugonots, in the reign of her son Charles, animated her to the most refined practice of her favourite theory; and afforded to the artful and ambitious queen mother a pretext for fomenting those dissensions, and perpetuating those feuds, by which she hoped to undermine or subdue a faction which daily became more formidable and more dangerous.

Astrologers had foretold that her son would die without issue, and that the diadem of France would encircle the brow of a prince of the line of Bourbon. Even the strong mind of Catherine was not proof against these impositions, which the dark credulity of the age received with implicit confidence, and sanctioned with the proudest reverence. It was therefore little to be wondered at, that the young Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre, (of the blood royal of France, and the idol chief of the Hugonots) became at once the object of her detestation and her dread; yet by one of those profound strokes of policy which distinguished her reign, she offered him in marriage her lovely and accomplished daughter, Margaret de Valois; and by this extraordinary proposal dissipated the Hugonot reserve, and gave an animated flow to the genial current of open-hearted confidence.

Although Henry embraced the proferred alliance, love had no share in this acceptance; his heart submitted to the tyranny of prudence, and his incli

nations became a sacrifice to the wishes of his party, which was flattered in the hope that this union would disseminate peace to France, and give to eternal oblivion the religious and political factions of her children. The Hugonots, in the ardour of their hearts, dazzled by the splendid promises of Catherine and her son, crowded to the capital, where magnificent preparations were already made for the nuptials of the king of Navarre; and, bewildered by the pleasures, and intoxicated by the alluring enjoyments of the most voluptuous court in Europe, the unsuspecting victims of the cruel policy of the queen slumbered over the dangers by which they were secretly surrounded; and revelling in the fair illusions of the present, cherished no suspicion of the brooding evils of the future.

On the 18th of August, 1572, all Paris resounded to the lively acclamations of joy, happiness, and festivity; for it was the wedding day of the king of Navarre and the princess de Valois. On the 24th of August, 1572, all France re-echoed the groans of the slaughtered Hugonots, for it was the massacre of St. Bartholomew ! History has enrolled in her annals the sanguinary transactions of this day with dreadful exactitude; but the eye, the heart will eagerly pass over a recital of those horrid deeds, which even in perusal blanch the glowing cheek of warm humanity, and surpass in reality the fancied atrocities which the most depraved and sanguinary imaginations could devise.

Catherine, who possessed herself neither the

religion of prejudice nor of truth, rendered the fanaticism of the times subservient to her policy; and instigated her jealous and deluded adherents to a massacre, which was executed under all the aggravating circumstances that religious fury, private pique, or public animosity could devise. The young king of Navarre found a comparative safety in flight; Charles and his mother triumphed in their execrable machinations; and France, for twenty-six successive years, groaned under the complicated woes which the transactions of one day engendered. Charles survied the massacre of St. Bartholomew but two years; and his brother Henry III. became the suc cessor to that "barren sceptre" with which Catherine amused the puerile minds of her sons, while she still retained the reins of government in her own hand.

It was at this period that a dangerous confederation arose in France, known by the name of the League. Its leader was of the house of Guise; its pretence, the defence of the church; and its secret motive, the subversion of the state. But that profound system of dissimulation which formed the soul of Italian politics, and which Catherine had imbibed with the principles of her idol Machiavel, served her in the most critical period of her life, and induced her to declare for the League, which she dreaded, and to unite herself to the Guises, whom she abhorred. Opposed therefore to the associated powers of the Court and League, stood the young king of Navarre; the hero of a little army of heroes; and, as he himself pleasantly expressed it, "a king without