But Mary Obligingly Died At This Moment, And The Stricken Widower Thought He Needed Consolation More Than His Boy, And So Married The Pretty Princess Himself.

He always prided himself greatly on the battle of St. Quentin, and probably soon came to believe he had done yeoman service there.

The childlike credulity of the people is a great temptation to kings. It is very likely that after the coup-d'etat of December, the trembling puppet who had sat shivering over his fire in the palace of the Elysee while Morny and Fleury and St. Arnaud and the rest of the cool gamblers were playing their last desperate stake on that fatal night, really persuaded himself that the work was his, and that he had saved society. That the fly should imagine he is moving the coach is natural enough; but that the horses, and the wooden lumbering machine, and the passengers should take it for granted that the light gilded insect is carrying them all, - there is the true miracle.

We must confess to a special fancy for Philip II. He was so true a king, so vain, so superstitious, so mean and cruel, it is probable so great a king never lived. Nothing could be more royal than the way he distributed his gratitude for the victory on St. Lawrence's day. To Count Egmont, whose splendid courage and loyalty gained him the battle, he gave ignominy and death on the scaffold; and to exhibit a gratitude to a myth which he was too mean to feel to a man, he built to San Lorenzo that stupendous mass of granite which is to-day the visible demonstration of the might and the weakness of Philip and his age.

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