Had one dark and atrocious transaction not taken place, the annalist might have stopped here, and painted the French monarch, with a few foibles and weaknesses, the common bequest of mortality, still as, upon the whole, a noble and magnanimous ruler. His ambition, great as it was, and desolating as it proved, both to the adjoining states, and in the end his own subjects, was the "last infirmity of noble minds." He shared it with Cæsar and Alexander, with Charlemagne and Napoleon. Even his cruel and unnecessary ravaging of the Palatinate, though attended with dreadful private suffering, has too many parallels in the annals of military cruelty. His personal vanities and weaknesses, his love of show, his passion for women, his extravagant expenses, were common to him with his grandfather Henry IV.; they seemed inherent in the Bourbon race, and are the frailties to which heroic minds in every age have been most subject. But, for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the heartrending cruelties with which it was carried into execution, no such apology can be found. It admits neither of palliation nor excuse. But for the massacre of St Bartholomew, and the expulsion of the Morescoes from Spain, it would stand foremost in the annals of the world for kingly perfidy and priestly cruelty. The expulsion of five hundred thousand innocent human beings from their country, for no other cause but difference of religious opinion--the destruction, it is said, of nearly an hundred thousand by the frightful tortures of the wheel and the stake--the wholesale desolation of provinces and destruction of cities for conscience sake, never will and never should be forgotten. It is the eternal disgrace of the Roman Catholic religion--a disgrace to which the "execrations of ages have not yet affixed an adequate censure"--that all these infamous state crimes took their origin in the bigoted zeal, or sanguinary ambition of the Church of Rome. Nor have any of them passed without their just reward. The expulsion of the Moors, the most industrious and valuable inhabitants of the Peninsula, has entailed a weakness upon the Spanish monarchy, which the subsequent lapse of two centuries has been unable to repair. The reaction against the Romish atrocities produced the great league of which William III. was the head; it sharpened the swords of Eugene and Marlborough; it closed in mourning the reign of Louis XV. Nor did the national punishment stop here. The massacre of St Bartholomew, and revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were the remote, but certain cause of the French Revolution, and all the unutterable miseries which it brought both upon the Bourbon race and the professors of the Romish faith. Nations have no immortality; their punishment is inflicted in this world; it is visited with unerring certainty on the third and fourth generations. Providence has a certain way of dealing with the political sins of men--which is, to leave them to the consequences of their own actions.