LOUIS XI. AT PLESSIS-LES-TOURS.

BY MISS LAWRANCE.

THE château of Plessis-les-Tours, and its cold and cruel lord, are familiar names to the modern English reader. Indeed, both the château and its chief inhabitants seem of late to have become favourite subjects of illustration. Louis is the hero of " Quentin Durward;" one of the finest chapters in "Notre Dame de Paris" gives a picture of him, startling from its vivid reality; Beranger has celebrated his later days in one of his best lyrics; and the artist, in the picture before us, has given us a portrait of Louis and his chief attendants, and, with singular minuteness and truth, has surrounded him with every favourite of his declining years, from Olivier le Daim even to "the little dogs and all," the claspt missals and the string of relics. But it is not Louis, the bold and crafty opponent of Burgundy, the feared of Germany, and the courted of England; not the skilful sower of discontent among the Flemish burghers that is now before us, but Louis, sinking into the grave, feeble, dreading to die, but still Louis, the suspicious, the crafty, the cruel.

From the period of his apoplectic seizure in 1479,

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