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 228 impenetrable. It can never be said of Catherine de Medici, as it is said of Mary Stuart, that she has been injured by the zeal of her friends, and helped by the falsehoods of her enemies. Catherine has few friends, and none whose enthusiasm is burdensome to bear. She has furnished easily-used material for writers of romance, who commonly represent her as depopulating France with poisoned gloves and perfumery; and she has served as a target—too big to be missed—for tyros in historical invective. We have come to regard her in a large, loose, picturesque way as an embodiment of evil,—very much, perhaps, as Mr. John Addington Symonds regards Clytemnestra,—fed and nourished by her sins, waxing fat upon iniquity, and destitute alike of conscience and of shame. And this is the reason that women who have spent their lives in the practice of laborious virtues stand fluttering with delight in that dark Medicean bedchamber. "Blois is the most interesting of all the châteaux," said one of them to me;—she looked as if she could not even tell a lie;—"you see the very bed in which Catherine de Medici died." And