There is no particular novelty in M. de Bouillé's account of the massacre of St Bartholomew. We cannot compliment him on the guarded manner in which he condemns his hero for his participation in that monster murder--an episode that would have sufficed to brand with eternal infamy a far greater and better man than Henry of Lorraine. Compelled to admit that the whole direction and combination of the massacre was intrusted to, and joyfully undertaken by, the Duke of Guise--that he was privy to and approving of Maurevel's previous attempt to assassinate Coligny, and that he afterwards stood under the Admiral's window whilst the Wurtemburger Besme, and others of his creatures, stabbed the wounded Protestant as he rose defenceless from his couch--M. de Bouillé informs us that, on quitting the place of his enemy's murder, whilst the most barbarous scenes were on all sides enacting--the consequence of the completeness and skill of his own preparations--Guise was _seized with compassion_, and had "the good thought to save many innocent victims, women, children, and even men," by sheltering them in his hotel. On the other hand, "those whom the Prince considered as factious, or as adherents of such--in a word, his political adversaries rather than heretics--found little pity at his hands." And he was proceeding "to carry death into the faubourg St Germain, and to seek there Montgomery, the Vidame de Chartres, and a hundred Protestant gentlemen whom prudence had prevented from lodging near the Admiral." The compassionate intentions of Guise towards these five score Huguenots and "political adversaries," could be so little doubtful, that it was certainly most fortunate for them that a friend swam the Seine and gave them warning, whilst a mistake about keys delayed the Duke's passage through the gate of Bussy. They escaped, pursued to some distance from Paris by Guise and his escort. On his return, the massacre was at its height. "Less pitiless than any of the other Catholic chiefs, he had opened in his own dwelling an asylum to more than a hundred Protestant gentlemen, _of whom he thought he should be able afterwards to make partisans_." His compassion, then, had not the merit of disinterestedness. Similar selfish considerations induced others of the assassins to rescue others of the doomed. It will be remembered, that Ambrose Paré found shelter and protection in the palace, from whose windows Charles IX., arquebuse in hand, is said to have amused himself by picking off the wretched Protestants, as they scudded through the streets with the blood-hounds at their heels. But all the skill of the Huguenot leech was insufficient, a few months later, to preserve that perfidious and cruel monarch from a death whose strange and horrible character was considered by many to be a token of God's displeasure at the oceans of blood he had so inhumanly caused to flow. Charles IX. was preceded and followed to the grave, at short intervals, by an active sharer in the massacre, the Duke of Aumale, and by one of its most vehement instigators and approvers, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, both uncles of the Duke, and notable members of the house of Guise. The change of religion of Henry of Navarre and of the young Prince of Condé, the siege of Rochelle, the conclusion of peace with the Protestants, and the accession of Henry III. to the throne of France, are the other important events that bring us to the end of the second volume of M. de Bouillé's interesting history.