himself murdered, with cireumstances specially atrocious, the Admiral Coligny. The king thereupon made common cause with the great enemy of the League, Henry of Navarre. Joining forces, they encamped before Paris, which Guise's brother, the "Mayenne" of the poem, now the chief of the League, held with his troops; and it is at this point that the "Henriade" opens.
The tone of those essays of Voltaire of which we have spoken gives promise of such independence of treatment, that the reader of them is somewhat surprised to find how many close imitations of Homer and Virgil his epic exhibits; and that, in fact, it would never have existed in its present form but for the ancient poets. The resemblance which the relations subsisting between his chief characters bear to the relations of those of the older epics need not be much insisted on, for they involve no deviations from history. If the king, ostensible chief of the besieging forces, plays in some degree Agamemnon to the Achilles of Bourbon, their real champion and leader—if Mornay, like Ulysses, brings all the weight of his wisdom to withdraw the hero from the silken toils of pleasure to the duties of the field—if D'Aumale, the prop of the beleaguered city, renowned in arms, having an inextinguishable thirst for battle, and always ready to undertake a champion of the enemy, resembles Hector in his life as well as in the fate, disastrous to the defenders, which he meets before the walls,—the answer is, that all these personages are represented as they really appeared in the war. But in other cases this kind of warrant does not exist. Just as the events which have preceded the opening of the "Æneid" are made known to the reader through Æneas's recital of them to Dido, so the incidents
