Morier no more after this happy day!

I would not bear again my father's name

Till I could deem it spotless! The hour's come!
Heaven smiled on Conscience! As the soldier rose
From rank to rank, how sacred was the fame
That cancelled crime, and raised him nearer thee!

MADAME DESCHAPPELLES.

A colonel and a hero! Well, that's something! He's wondrously improved! I wish you joy, Sir!

MELNOTTE.

Ah! the same love that tempts us into sin,
If it be true love, works out its redemption;
And he who seeks repentance for the Past
Should woo the Angel Virtue in the future!

RICHELIEU:

OR,

THE CONSPIRACY.

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"Le Comte de Soissons, et le Duc de Bouillon, avaient une bonne armée, et ils savaient la conduire; et pour plus grande sûreté, tandis que cette armée devait s'avancer, on devait assassiner le Cardinal et faire soulever Paris. . . . Les Conjurés faisient un traité avec l'Espagne pour introduire des troupes en France, et pour y mettre tout en confusion dans une Régence qu'on croyait prochaine, et dont chacun esperait profiter. . . . Richelieu avait perdu toute sa faveur, et ne conservait que l'avantage d'être nécessaire. Le bonheur du Cardinal voulut encore que le complot fut découvert, et qu'une copie du traité lui tombât entre les mains."- VOLTAIRE, Hist. Gen.

PREFACE.

THE administration of Cardinal Richelieu, whom (despite all his darker qualities) Voltaire and History justly consider the true architect of the French monarchy, and the great parent of French civilization, is characterized by features alike tragic and comic. A weak king- an ambitious favorite; a despicable conspiracy against the minister, nearly always associated with a dangerous treason against the State these, with little variety of names and dates, constitute the eventful cycle through which, with a dazzling ease, and an arrogant confidence, the great luminary fulfilled its destinies. Blent together, in startling contrast, we see the grandest achievements and the pettiest agents; the spythe mistress -the capuchin; — the destruction of feudalism; the humiliation of Austria; memberment of Spain.

the dis

Richelieu himself is still what he was in his own day, a man of two characters. If, on the one hand, he is justly represented as inflexible and vindictive, crafty and unscrupulous; so, on the other, it cannot be denied that he was placed in times in which the long impunity of every license required stern examples, that he was beset by perils and

intrigues, which gave a certain excuse to the subtlest inventions of self-defence, that his ambition was inseparably connected with a passionate love for the glory of his country, and that, if he was her dictator, he was not less her benefactor. It has been fairly remarked, by the most impartial historians, that he was no less generous to merit than severe to crime, — that, in the various departments of the State, the Army, and the Church, he selected and distinguished the ablest aspirants, that the wars which he conducted were, for the most part, essential to the preservation of France, and Europe itself, from the formidable encroachments of the Austrian House, that, in spite of those wars, the people were not oppressed with exorbitant imposts, and that he left the kingdom he had governed in a more flourishing and vigorous state than at any former period of the French history, or at the decease of Louis XIV.

The cabals formed against this great statesman were not carried on by the patriotism of public virtue, or the emulation of equal talent; they were but court struggles, in which the most worthless agents had recourse to the most desperate means. In each, as I have before observed, we see combined the twofold attempt to murder the minister and to betray the country. Such, then, are the agents, and such the designs with which truth, in the Drama as in History, requires us to contrast the celebrated Cardinal; not disguising his foibles or his vices, but not unjust to the grander qualities (especially the