The great historic fact of the St. Bartholomew is what we confine ourselves to; and we have attempted to depict it accurately as regards Charles IX.'s hesitations and equally feverish resolutions, his intermixture of open-heartedness and double-dealing in his treatment of Coliguy, towards whom he felt himself drawn without quite understanding him, and his puerile weakness in presence of his mother, whom he feared far more than he trusted.

The piece is likewise important from a metrical point of view, since it not only contains a free intermixture of ottava and terza rima, and hendecasyllables with rimalmezzo, a favourite verse form in certain kinds of composition, but likewise foreshadows, in its mingling of freely riming hendecasyllables with settenarî, the peculiar measures of the pastoral drama proper.

On an April day he notes that "the flower of the Sassafras was fully out and looked wellan intermixture of this and

Rutter's verse also displays a certain nervousness of its own which is wanting in the model, though it preserves the intermixture of blank verse with irregular rimes which Daniel affected.

Englishmen can understand such an intermixture the more readily from the analogies, more or less close, which their own history supplies.