RÉNÉ OF ANJOU, commonly known as the "good King Réné," was born at the castle of Angers in 1409. The first part of his life was remarkable for a course of tantalizing events. He had not long obtained possession of the duchy of Lorraine, in right of his wife, when Anthony, Count of Vaudemont drove him from it. Not long afterwards the intelligence, that his brother Louis of Anjou, and Joan, Queen of Naples, had died, leaving him heir to their dominions, reached him when he was the prisoner of the Duke of Burgundy, and unable to lay hold of his newly-acquired rights. It is true that he was soon released; but fortune still continued to make him her sport. Before he had been four years on the Neapolitan throne, Alfonso of Aragon forced him to leave his crown and flee. He returned to France in 1442, only to find that his territories there were occupied by the English. It was not until after the marriage of his daughter Margaret with Henry VI. of England in 1443 that he was allowed, for the first time in his life, to settle down in undisputed possession of a part of his dominions. This severe course of experience did not prevent Réné from spending the remainder of his days in sustaining the mock state of a sovereign. Establishing a court in the old castle of Aix in Provence, and keeping up the empty title of King of Naples, the Two Sicilies, and Jerusalem, he conducted himself more like a monarch in a romance than a prince in that troublous and warlike age. Dancing, music, painting, and poetry were his serious business. Troubadours and knights-errant were his only courtiers. If he ever came out among ordinary men and things, it was to superintend some public mime or pageant, or to introduce some luxury among his subjects. So genial and pleasant, indeed, was his rule that, after his death in 1480, the natives of Provence long cherished the memory of the "good King Réné." As recently as 1823 his statue, wrought in marble by David, was placed in one of the squares of Aix. A graphic account of Réné is given in Scott's Anne of Geierstein.