[180] Alphonsus II. married three times: first, Lucrezia de' Medici; secondly, Barbara of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand I.; thirdly, Margherita di Gonzaga, daughter of William Duke of Mantua.—T.
[181] George Washington, in command of the English and native troops, defeated the French in the Battle of Great Meadows on the 28th of May 1754. He was subsequently besieged at Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania and, on the 4th of July 1754, surrendered to the French, who allowed him and all his troops to march back to Virginia.—T.
[182] My Études Historiques.—Author's Note.
[183] Sixtus V.—T.
[184] In July 1586, after a confinement of more than seven years.—T.
[185] Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544-1590), author of, among other poems, the Semaine, ou La Création en sept journées, which was published in 1579 and passed through thirty editions in a few years. Writing of Du Bartas, Professor Saintsbury, in his Short History of French Literature and French Lyrics, says:
"All that was wanting to make Du Bartas a poet of the first rank was some faculty of self-criticism; of natural verve and imagination as well as of erudition he had no lack, but in critical faculty he seems to have been totally deficient. His beauties, rare in kind and not small in amount, are alloyed with vast quantities of dull absurdity."
Du Bartas' fellow-countrymen entertain a similar view, and Bouillet, in his Dictionnaire universel d'histoire et de géographie, expresses himself in almost the same words when he writes that "ce poète avait de la verve et de l'imagination, mais manquait de goût."—T.
[186] Marco Sciarra (fl. 1592), a celebrated bandit chief, long devastated the Papal States. Neither Sixtus V. nor Clement VIII. was able to subdue him and his band; but he was so hotly pursued by the latter Pope that he left the country and entered the service of the Venetians, who employed him against the Uskoks, the piratical refugees from the north-western provinces of Turkey. The Venetian Government eventually caused Sciarra to be assassinated, upon the repeated demands of Clement VIII. for his extradition.—T.
[187] Samuel Rogers introduces this incident into his description of the "wild life, fearful and full of change," of the "mountain-robber:"