O'er his brow, threatening, blood-stained, terrible,
Was spread the sweet serenity of peace."
The prisoners join his ranks. The news of his victory spreads, and the Leaguers are almost in despair. Discord, knowing that with his triumph will come the end of her reign, resorts, in order to arrest his career, to a last stratagem, which forms the subject of the ninth canto.
It might be supposed that the solemn incidents, the celestial experience, and the divine counsel of the preceding canto would have fortified the king against such a disreputable device as that which the malignant Discord now had recourse to. She repairs to the temple of Love (which is full of allegorical personages), and rousing the deity from his bed of flowers, enlists him in her cause. Delighted with a mission so completely suited to him, he flies at once to the plains of Ivry, near which Henry was hunting. Love "felt at sight of his victim an inhuman joy; he hardened his features and made ready his chain,"—then commanding the winds to assemble the clouds, and to bring on night with thunder and lightning, he lit his flambeau to lead him astray:—
Followed this hostile star that lit the shades,
As the benighted traveller is seen
To follow meteors which the earth exhales—
Those treacherous fires which shed malignant light
To lure the victim to the precipice."
The "precipice" is the fair Mademoiselle d'Estrées, the "belle Gabrielle" of history, then a dweller in these woods:—
