6 FLY FISHING FOE TROUT. 



generally known as Gaston Phoebus. He was 

 lord of two principalities on the slopes of the 

 Pyrenees. He came of a famous house, which 

 gave to the world both that other Gaston de 

 Foix, the young, the gallant, and the unfortu- 

 nate, who commanded the French at Ravenna 

 when only three and twenty, and was killed at 

 the moment of victory : and also Catherine de 

 Foix, the noble wife of the feeble Jean d' Albret, 

 and the ancestress of Henri IV. Gaston 

 Phoebus is an amazing figure even for the end 

 of the Middle Ages, a time when a ruler's 

 character, good or bad, could develop exactly as 

 it pleased. His life was devoted to fighting, 

 hunting, and the administration of what he was 

 pleased to call justice, bloodthirsty and specta- 

 cular. He murdered his only son, yet Froissart, 

 who visited him at his castle of Orthez, picks 

 him out as the model prince. Accompanied by 

 two nobles and forty lances, he crossed Europe 

 from the Pyrenees to Konigsberg, with two 

 objects : to fight the heathen inhabitants of East 

 Prussia, and to hunt reindeer in Sweden. And, 

 be it noted, after fighting the Prussians, he had 

 to help to put down a Bolshevist rising ; for thus 

 does history anticipate itself. He hurried back 

 to France to quell the Jacquerie, the ferocious 

 peasant revolt led by Jacques Bonhomme. But 

 there was no end to his adventures, for his 

 character had no half tones, but was everything 

 to excess. When angry, which was often, he 



