Henry de Guise came forward as their leader in this grand design; there are to be read, beneath a portrait of him done in the sixteenth century, these verses, also of that date:-- "The virtue, greatness, wisdom from on high, Of yonder duke, triumphant far and near, Do make bad men to shrink with coward fear, And God's own Catholic church to fructify.
In armor clad, like maddened Mars he moves; The trembling Huguenot cowers at his glance; A prop for holy church is his good lance; His eye is ever mild to those he loves." Guise cultivated very carefully this ardent confidence on the part of Catholic France; he recommended to his partisans attention to little pious and popular practices.

"I send you some paternosters [meaning, in the plural, the beads of a chaplet, or the chaplet entire]," he wrote to his wife, Catherine of Cleves; "you will have strings made for them and string them together.

I don't know whether you dare offer some of them to the queens and to my lady mother.

Ask advice of Mesdames de Retz and de Villeroy about it." The flight and insurrection of the Duke of Anjou and the King of Navarre furnished the Duke of Guise with a very natural occasion for re-engaging in the great struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, wherein the chief part belonged to him.

Let us recur, for a moment, to the origin of that struggle and the part taken in it, at the outset, by the princes of the house of Lorraine.