Ramus, one of the last and of the most to be lamented victims of the St.Bartholomew; Francis Hotman, who, in his Franco-Gallia, aspired to graft the new national liberties upon the primitive institutions of the Franks; Hubert Languet, the eloquent author of the _Vindicice contra tyrannos, or de la Puissance legitime du Prince cur le Peuple et du Peuple sur le Prince;_ John Bodin, the first, in original merit, amongst the publicists of the sixteenth century, in his _six livres de LA REPUBLIQUE;_ all these eminent men boldly tackled the great questions of political liberty or of legislative reforms.

_Le Contre-un,_ that republican treatise by De la Boetie, written in 1546, and circulated, at first, in manuscript only, was inserted, between 1576 and 1578, in the _Memoires de l'Etat de France,_ and passionately extolled by the independent thinker Michael de Montaigne in his Essais, of which nine editions were published between 1580 and 1598, and evidently very much read in the world of letters.

An intellectual movement so active and powerful could not fail to have a potent effect upon political life.
Before the St.Bartholomew, the great religious and political parties, the Catholic and the Protestant, were formed and at grips; the house of Lorraine at the head of the Catholics, and the house of Bourbon, Conde, and Coligny at the head of the Protestants, with royalty trying feebly and vainly to maintain between them a hollow peace.

To this stormy and precarious, but organized and clearly defined condition, the St.

Bartholomew had caused anarchy to succeed.