her a standing among the first. Nor was his internal administration less beneficial. Louis XI. had given centralization to the country; but Louis XIV. devised and established the instruments it needed for its own permanence, and its efficient operation. He invented new methods and improved old ones, until he secured a very complete system of communication between the Court and the country; making the sovereign will to be promptly felt at the extremities, and securing an equally prompt return of service and taxes. The civil and military branches of the administration were put on a new and efficient footing by his energy and skill.

He, in fact, changed the very character of war. It had thus far been a mere adventurous game. Men had hunted men, as they did beasts; not for their carcasses indeed, but for their possessions. But Louis certainly lifted the terrible art one stage above that. As Mr. Guizot has characterized his conflicts, "they were the wars of a regular government; of a government fixed in the centre of its dominions, endeavoring to extend its conquests around, to increase or consolidate its territory; in short, they were political wars. They may have been just or unjust; they may have cost France too dear; they may be objected to, on many grounds on the score of morality, or excess; but, in fact, they were of a much more rational character than the wars which preceded them; they were no longer fanciful adventures; they were dictated by serious motives; their objects were, to reach some natural boundary, to incorporate with France, some population who spoke the same language, or to secure some point of defence against a neighboring power."

Indeed, the whole military art was greatly advanced during this reign. If the world were as it ought to be, this would not constitute a recommendation. But war is international police

in action; a providential medicine; though generally administered by selfish practitioners; cruelly, and for their own benefit. We may complain of it, organize against it, and even essentially modify it by our efforts; but war must needs be, while sin remains ascendant. However modified it may become under the influence of Christian principle, it is to go on, like civil, political, and criminal jurisprudence and punishment; advancing to perfection; as a dreadful defence of society against sin. The mighty generals of Louis' army, his admirable military engineers, his great prime-minister, gave a new impulse to the military art.

Mr. Guizot likewise attributes much of his country's progress in the career of civilization, to the enlightened legislation introduced in that age. He also regards this reign as distinguished for putting the science and art of diplomacy on a new footing. "It became systematic and regular, and was always directed towards a certain object, according to permanent principles. And among other important changes, the regular birth of the system of the balance of power in Europe took place at this period."

So that we find in the antecedents of that reign, and in the person and administration of that monarch, the solution of the inquiries we have imagined some of our readers to propose : how came this monarch to conceive the idea of an absolute government, and to execute it so thoroughly; and, how came society to receive it so unhesitatingly?

It must occur to every intelligent reader of the history of France, that the age of Louis XIV. was one of peculiar promise; and he will naturally inquire whether that promise has been fulfilled. The Protestant reader, especially, will look to this reign for the legitimate social effects of Popery; for, in this reign, Popery and monarchy had uncontrolled sway; an open field, and a glorious opportunity. What, then, were the

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results of that experiment? No future sovereign can ever be more absolute in a European nation. The Catholic church can never ask for a mighty nation to be more absolutely under her control, or more rigidly faithful to her principles. Louis. was her favorite son, Massillon, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Bridaine, Fenelon, Arnaud, and Pascal, were then in the schools and pulpits of the nation; and all, Catholics. Will she ever see such a constellation again in her heavens? To an intelligent observer of that age, looking on France as she appeared in the middle of the last half of the seventeenth century, it must have been certain that France had before her a prosperous and brilliant career. With such an impulse as she received from the powerful writers, statesmen, generals, and artists of that period; with her language just moulded into a definite form, by the labors of Boileau and Pascal; with the basis thus laid for popular education; with the consolidated form given to the country, and the absolute ascendency secured to the crown and the crosier, what more could a friend of legitimate authority and of the Papal church have asked, as giving assurance of unrivalled prosperity and progress to the great nation? And yet, wonderful fact! that morning of France's glory, was the sunset of her greatness; so that it is exceedingly painful to pass, within less than a century, from that brilliant reign to the horrors of the Revolution, in which altar and throne, social order and domestic life, were dashed from their elevation into that abyss of anarchy, calling itself "the reign of Reason.” And yet there is a cause for this effect. And the same intelligent observer, if he could have been endowed with the present experience of mankind, might have seen the seeds of destruction already sowed in that brilliant garden-plot, by the hands of that most licentious, priestridden, and magnificent monarch. An absolute sovereign with a Jesuit confessor at his ear; a

succession of mistresses in his palace; and a people from whom the Bible was hidden, that they might worship the Mass-book; there is the key to this mystery.

And it cannot but refresh the spirit of the generous scholar, whose studies have led him to breathe, for a time, the stifled air of Louis' court, to feel such Alpine breezes as he will find coming upon him from the heights of the pure Christian literature which distinguished that period. For, nothing can be in stronger contrast than the moral atmosphere of Louis' court, and that of the poets of his day; of whom John von Müller thus speaks: "the electric shock of these writers roused the North from the monotonous studies of its universities." It was in the very age of this great extinguisher of freedom that those splendid writers were kindling the blaze in France, which was to consume at one time, altar and throne, and set the world on fire.

It then enhances our estimate of these writers to remember the period in which they live. We see in Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, Racine, Corneille, and even Fenelon, the seeds of liberty, growing silently and obscurely under a soil frozen to a rocky hardness by the winter of absolutism. While Louis is flourishing, absolute monarchy is, in fact, decaying. And when he dies, it dies with him. He has been working in one direction with his machinery of tyranny; but the human mind, the people, nay, God himself, has been silently working in the opposite direction, towards freedom of thought and boldness of speculation; towards an emancipation of the human intellect. from royal and ghostly tyranny. And so, there is but a space of seventy-five years between the death of the Grand Monarch and the horrible imprisonment and murder of Louis XVI.

It may be thought by some of our readers, and perhaps justly, that for an introduction to a literary discussion, there is

too much prominence here given to political topics. Can they then consent to be kept back for a few moments longer from the lectures, that they may receive a more appropriate introduction to the literature of the Augustan age of France?

The French language, as Pascal found it, had come through troubled channels. We can trace it back to the dialects produced by the fusion of Roman conquerors and colonists with the native Celts. These dialects were then transformed in their turn by the German invaders. Out of this Teutonic modification of the Gallic, came the Romance, which afterwards branched into two dialects, the Southern, or langue d'oc, and Northern, or langue d'oï. The former is the famous Provençal, or language of the Troubadours; the latter is the foundation of the French. It attained this supremacy over its rival, by means of the Court and the University of Paris. The Provençal was fertile in poetry; and is even thought by some to have given tone to the literature of Europe, for a time. It fell, at length, with the political independence of Southern Gaul, in the thirteenth century. "The martyred Albigenses' expiring groan was the last sigh of the muse of the Troubadours."

The Walloon, or French, was still a harsh, dry language; in fact, a barbarous jargon, when it became, under Hugh Capet, the language of the nation.

Even down to the fifteenth century, the literature in neither of the dialects had ever really seized upon the soul of the people. It met only their lighter wants; while serious and learned men still employed the language of Cicero as the medium of uttering their thoughts. But that fifteenth century was the period of gestation for France and the civilized world. It poured the classic scholars of Constantinople upon Western Europe; and it gave the world the printing-press.

The literature of the period of Francis I., becoming under