I have observed the affectation which, for many years past, has
prevailed in Paris even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the
memory of your Henry the Fourth. If anything could put any one out of
humour with that ornament to the kingly character, it would be this
overdone style of insidious panegyric. The persons who have worked this
engine the most busily are those who have ended their panegyrics in
dethroning his successor and descendant; a man, as good natured, at the
least, as Henry the Fourth; altogether as fond of his people; and who
has done infinitely more to correct the ancient vices of the state than
that great monarch did, or we are sure he ever meant to do. Well it is
for his panegyrists that they have not him to deal with. For Henry of
Navarre was a resolute, active, and politic prince. He possessed indeed
great humanity and mildness; but a humanity and mildness that never
stood in the way of his interests. He never sought to be loved without
putting himself first in a condition to be feared. He used soft language
with determined conduct. He asserted and maintained his authority in
the gross, and distributed his acts of concession only in the detail. He
spent the income of his prerogative nobly; but he took care not to break
in upon the capital; never abandoning for a moment any of the claims
which he made under the fundamental laws, nor sparing to shed the
blood of those who opposed him, often in the field, sometimes upon
the scaffold. Because he knew how to make his virtues respected by the
ungrateful, he has merited the praises of those, whom if they had
lived in his time, he would have shut up in the Bastile, and brought to
punishment along with the regicides whom he hanged after he had famished
Paris into a surrender.