O may you, of your dogmas disabused,
His worship and His altars raise again!
Farewell—reign happy—may a stronger power
Protect your life from the assassin's steel.
You know the League, you see what blows it strikes,
That aim, through me, to reach your bosom too.
The day may come… a still more barbarous hand…
Just heaven! O spare the earth a soul so rare!…
Permit… ' but at these words death, pitiless,
Comes rushing on his head, and ends his lot."
In the camp Bourbon is hailed as king; in the city the Leaguers assemble to choose a monarch. Whilst they are occupied in their deliberations (in which Potier, a citizen, by his assertion of Bourbon's rights in the very presence of Mayenne, earns for himself an immortal niche in the poem), they are startled by a sudden call to arms. Henry has chosen that moment to direct an assault upon the walls:—
"Bourbon employed not those propitious hours
In rendering funeral honours to the king,
In decking forth his tomb with titles brave
Which living pride upon the dead bestows;
Not by his hand those desolated shores
Were cumbered with the pomp of sepulchres,
Whereby, despite the strokes of time and fate,
The arrogance of rank prevails o'er death:
He thought to send the Valois in his grave
Darksome a tribute worthier of his shade,
Punish his murderers, his foes confound,
And o'er the land subdued spread happiness."
The attack, in which the English auxiliaries, led by Essex, take part, "marching for the first time under our colours, and seeming astonished to serve our kings," is successful. The suburbs are taken; and Henry, excited
