GOOD Louis went to heaven soon after the wicked fifteenth century had sent its last sinner in the other direction. He had loved the comfort of his people, had put justice within their easier reach, had spared their purses by thinning his own, had deliberately limited some of his own powers to secure their rights, had done much to consolidate the kingdom, and hence the social weal; and at last, when preparing to leave it all, he said one day: "We are laboring in vain. | That big boy is going to spoil everything for us."

The big boy was Francis of Valois. Louis had given him his daughter Claude and through her the future throne of France. He enters history as Francis the First.

Perhaps you remember the mighty coat of mail which stood in the Louvre, the last but one in the gallery, some twenty years ago. It made you think of Goliath of Gath; of Polyphemus, with the one big eye under its visor; of one of Don Quixote's knights of enchantment. That belonged to the Francis of the Field of the Cloth of Gold-the first Francis of France.

He was six feet in height; tall for a Frenchman.

"Every inch a king"?

No; not even with Titian's testimony to a heroic turn and harmony of limb. But the very function of the artist and the poet is the flattering lie. Besides, in Titian's portrait (also in the Louvre), the lower half of the figure is elegantly omitted. The homely English chronicler, whom Henry brought with him on his visit, pictures Francis with big feet, short legs like Napoleon le Petit's, and broad shoulders,-points that tell in a wrestling-match more than they impose in court or levee. And they served their owner once royally well-at the close of the brilliant jousts and tournaments of the Cloth of Gold. He and bluff Harry went away under a tent to drink together. Quoth Harry, "Brother, I should like to wrestle with you," and took him by the collar, and swayed him once or twice to right and left.

For the illustrations of this article we are indebted to the courtesy of Messrs. Estes & Lauriat of Boston, publishers of "Guizot's Popular History of France. With 300 illustrations by A. De Neuville, and 40 fine steel engravings"-the work

from which these cuts are taken.

"But Francis," says the scribe, "who is a mighty good wrestler, gave him a turn and threw him on the ground." Francis had, moreover, thick lips, a long nose and large eyes.

Lips, nose and eyes were prophetic of their owner's future. The philosophical historian might spare himself a headache and his readers immeasurable yawns, by closing research and fixing the prime motive of Francis's career on that nasal organ of such noticeable linear dimensions. The theory commends itself by the beautiful simplicity of truth. Francis did, from first to last, just what every man of us must do-follow his nose. It led him into situations of peril and of splendor, of honor and of shame.

once.

The Renaissance-that is, the regeneration, the new birth-seemed to thousands then, and, indeed, seems to thousands now, rather the throes of a violent death than the leapings of a nascent life. It was both at Perhaps the highest and the lowest in man's nature found vent just then, and in outbursts more intense and explosive. Life— a man's, a nation's-was condensed and vivified as in a drama. The most startling contrasts of situation, such as usually stand apart by decades, made the story of a month, a week. The survival of one community, not always the fittest, seemed to involve, in its own view at least, the destruction of all the rest.

He

Francis had been twenty-one years old and King only six months gone, when he marched his army across the Alps, to cleave his way through the valleys and plains of all the long peninsula of Italy, and to regain the Neapolitan crown. A tremendous obstacle confronted him at the second step. must make his Alpine passage along ravines, over chasms, under toppling crags, where never man had trodden before, except the few chamois-hunters of the spot. It would make a grand picture-Francis on a charger in the brilliant costume of his time-the broad, shading hat; winding, waving plume; velvet cloak drooping from one shoulder— all bright with the favorite colors which inspired the hand of Titian to paint; beside him, the slender sinewy form of the hunterguide, who is pointing to his King the airy path which only himself and the lammergeyer know; the young monarch gazing up

and away along crest and crest of gloomy woods, death-white masses of snows quietly preparing for their plunge, and causeways that seem to bear one only to the skies.

A singular scene was that of Francis at the bedside of Henry the Eighth. It shines at once with one of the most interesting traits of the man, and with the dawning light of the moral Renaissance. It could not have occurred a generation earlier, or its sequel would have been as widely different as semi-barbarism and treachery differ from civilization and magnanimity.

It was one early morning of the fête-days of the Cloth of Gold when Francis rode, almost alone, across the clanking bridge of Henry's strong castle. The English knights looked down from battlement and loop-hole upon him in astonishment.

"Where is the King, my brother ?" he gayly asks of those that crowd around his horse, half ready to seize him, and lead him prisoner to Henry. Tableau Ist.

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Sir, he hath not yet awoke."

But he rides up the castle court to the door which had been pointed out to him, knocks at it with his hilt, and strides to the bedside of the King.

Henry, in bed, rose on his elbow, and stared at him, as at a ghost-Tableau No. 2-but rallied handsomely by exclaiming :

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Brother, you show me the great trust I should have in you. I am your prisoner;" and giving him, from his own neck, a jeweled collar worth fifteen thousand angels. Francis unhooked a thirty-thousand-angel bracelet and gave it to Henry. Tableau No. 3.

Tableau No. 4. England getting out of bed; France, meanwhile, holding England's shirt to warm before the blazing, smoking fire of logs. Autres temps, autres mœurs.

Several artists have taken pleasure in picturing the interview between Francis and Robert Estienne, quite as well known now, and much better then, as Stephanus. The combination may well strike us of the nineteenth century as one of the grimmest humors of history.

It is glorified as a proof of the monarch's magnanimity toward the scholar artisan, and as a proud moment for the "art preservative of arts" in France. It is, indeed, an honor to the warrior King, the ambitious, irrepressible will that snatched at the Emperorship of Germany and withstood a whole Continental coalition, that he found wish and time to sanction and aid literature. Francis, in this work, was indeed an agent

in producing that historic phase which is emphatically and peculiarly the Renaissance. His feeling toward those quiet men who sat in cloister or study, conjuring up the spirits of the classic dead, and making them a living, inspiring voice to the noisy, convulsed age; his foundation of the Royal College, which then, as ever since, represented protest against the arrogance of the Church; his expressed admiration of Erasmus, and desire to make him President of the institution; his establishment of the Library of France; his generous patronage of Marot,—all shed a more genuine luster on his name and his position than many, or perhaps all, of his exploits in the field.

In visiting Robert Estienne, Francis recognized both letters and industry—high letters, and an industry then honored more highly than at present. He went often to Estienne's printing-house in the Rue St. Jean de Beauvais. Sometimes he and his sister Marguerite dropped in together upon the learned man and watched, with longcontinued interest, the slow process of the press, the composing, the inking and impression done by hand. One day he waited courteously and in silence until Estienne had finished the correction of a proof.

But if Francis had possessed the prophetic eye to trace the consequences and results of that humble process, another fate would have seized the printer, with his "devil and all his works." Francis would have seen empires crushed to their death under that simple lever; his kingly craft besmirched blacker than those ink-balls defaced the forms under them; theories of divine rights riddled by its shower of "bullets of the brain." But there he sits complacent in his own impregnable superiority, every ambitious jealousy directed far away; food, warmth, caress bestowed upon the bourgeois foundling which, three centuries later, is to drive his successors, the sixteenth Louis, the great Napoleon, and the little one, the tenth Charles, the first King of the French, from the heritage he leaves them.

Francis was the hero of one of the most brilliant and perhaps the last of the royal accolades. In that scene he joined the mediæval with the modern world.

The knighting took place upon the battlefield itself. Francis asked it at the hands of Bayard, the Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.

"Sir," answered the Chevalier, "he who has been crowned by the hand of Heaven is knight over all other knights."