made so great a case of Villeroi's co-operation and influence, that, without loving him as he loved Sully, he upheld him and kept him as secretary of state for foreign affairs to the end of his reign.

He precisely defined his peculiar merit when he said, "Princes have servants of all values and all sorts; some do their own business before that of their master; others do their master's and do not forget their own; but Villeroi believes that his master's business is his own, and he bestows thereon the same zeal that another does in pushing his own suit or laboring at his own vine." Though short and frigidly written, the Memoires of Villeroi give, in fact, the idea of a man absorbed in his commission and regarding it as his own business as well as that of his king and country.
Philip du Plessis-Mornay occupied a smaller place than Sully and Villeroi in the government of Henry IV.; but he held and deserves to keep a great one in the history of his times.

He was the most eminent and also the most moderate of the men of profound piety and conviction of whom the Reformation had made a complete conquest, soul and body, and who placed their public fidelity to their religious creed above every other interest and every other affair in this world.

He openly blamed and bitterly deplored Henry IV.'s conversion to Catholicism, but he did not ignore the weighty motives for it; his disapproval and his vexation did not make him forget the great qualities of his king or the services he was rendering France, or his own duty and his earlier feelings towards him.

This unbending Protestant, who had contributed as much as anybody to put Henry IV.