steel breast-plates and ordinary dresses. That was a great and symptomatic improvement: it at once induced an esprit de corps and a sense of responsibility. He first made the troops march with a measured step, and caused large bodies of men to move with the precision of a single company. The artillery and engineer service, under his auspices, made astonishing progress. His discerning eye selected the genius of Vauban, which invented, as it were, the modern system of fortification, and well-nigh brought it to its greatest elevation --and raised to the highest command that of Turenne, which carried the military art to the most consummate perfection. Skillfully turning the martial and enterprising genius of the Franks into the career of conquest, he multiplied tenfold their power, by conferring on them the inestimable advantages of skilled discipline and unity of action. He gathered the feudal array around his banner; he roused the ancient barons from their chateaux, the old retainers from their villages. But he arranged them in disciplined battalions of regular troops, who received the pay and obeyed the orders of government, and never left their banners. His regular army was all enrolled by voluntary enlistment, and served for pay. The militia alone was raised by conscription. When he summoned the military forces of France to undertake the conquest of the Low Countries, he appeared at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men, all regular and disciplined troops, with a hundred pieces of cannon. Modern Europe had never seen such an array. It was irresistible, and speedily brought the monarch to the gates of Amsterdam.

9.

give unity to

thought.

The same unity which the genius of Louis and his minis ters communicated to the military power of France, His efforts to he gave also to its naval forces and internal strength. To such a pitch of greatness did he raise the marine of the monarchy, that it all but outnumbered that of England; and the battle of La Hogue, in 1692, alone determined, as Trafalgar did a century after, to which of these rival powers the dominion of the seas was to belong. His Ordi

nances of the Marine, promulgated in 1781, form the best code of maritime law yet known, and one which is still referred to, like the Code Napoleon, as a ruling authority in all commercial states.

He introduced astonishing reforms into the proceedings of the courts of law, and to his efforts the great perfection of the French law, as it now appears in the admirable works of Pothier, is in a great degree to be ascribed. He reduced the government of the interior to that regular and methodical system of governors of provinces, mayors of cities, and other subordinate authorities, all receiving their instructions from the Tuileries, which, under no subsequent change of government, imperial or royal, has been abandoned, and which has, in every succeeding age, formed the main source of its strength. He concentrated around the monarchy the rays of genius from all parts of the country, and threw around its head a luster of literary renown, which, more even than the exploits of his armies, dazzled and fascinated the minds of men. He arrayed the scholars, philosophers, and poets of his dominions like soldiers and sailors; almost all the academies of France, which have since become so famous, were of his institution he sought to give discipline to thought, as he had done to his fleets and armies, and rewarded distinction in literary efforts not less than warlike achievement. No monarch ever knew better the magical influence of intellectual strength on general opinion, or felt more strongly the expedience of enlisting it on the side of authority. Not less than Hildebrand or Napoleon, he aimed at drawing, not over his own country alone, but the whole of Europe, the meshes of regulated and centralized thought; and more durably than either he attained his object. The religious persecution, which constitutes the great blot on his reign, and caused its brilliant career to close in mourning, was the result of the same desire. He longed to give the same unity to the Church which he had done to the army, navy, and civil strength of the monarchy. He saw no reason why the Huguenots should not, at the royal command, face about like one of Turenne's battalions.

Schism in the Church was viewed by him in exactly the same light as rebellion in the state. No efforts were spared by inducements, good deeds, and fair promises, to make proselytes; but when twelve hundred thousand Protestants resisted his seductions, the sword, the fagot, and the wheel were resorted to without mercy for their destruction.

General re

his ideas of government to those of Napoleon.

Napoleon, it is well known, had the highest admiration of 10. Louis XIV. Nor is this surprising: their princisemblance of ples of government and leading objects of ambition were the same. "L'état-c'est moi," was the principle of this grandson of Henry IV.: "Your first duty is to me, your second to France," said the emperor to his nephew, Prince Louis Napoleon. In different words, the idea was the same. To concentrate Europe in France, France in Paris, Paris in the government, and the government in himself, was the ruling idea of each. But it was no concentration for selfish or unworthy purposes which was thus desired. It was for great and lofty objects that this undivided power was sought by both. It was neither to gratify the desire of an Eastern seraglio, nor exercise the tyranny of a Roman emperor, that either coveted unbounded authority. It was to exalt the nation of which they formed the head, to augment its power, extend its dominion, enhance its fame, magnify its resources, that they both deemed themselves sent into the world. It was the general sense that this was the object of their administration which constituted the strength of both. Equally with the popular party in the present day, they regarded society as a pyramid, of which the multitude formed the base, and the monarch the head. Equally with the most ardent democrat, they desired the augmentation of the national resources, the increase of public felicity. But they both thought that these blessings must descend from the sovereign to his subject, not ascend from the subjects to their sovereign. “Every thing for the people, nothing by them,” which Napoleon described as the secret of good government, was not less the maxim of the imperious despot of the Bourbon race.

11.

ideas of each Magnificent

as shown in their public

works.

The identity of their ideas, the similarity of their objects of ambition, appears in the monuments which both have left at Paris. Great as was the desire of the emperor to add to its embellishment, magnificent as were his ideas in the attempt, he has yet been unable to equal the noble structures of the Bourbon dynasty. The splendid pile of Versailles, the glittering dome of the Invalides, still, after the lapse of a century and a half, overshadow all the other monuments in the metropolis, though the confiscations of the Revolution, and the victories of the emperor, gave succeeding governments the resources of the half of Europe for their construction. The inscription on the arch of Louis, “Ludovico Magno," still seems to embody the gratitude of the citizens to the greatest benefactor of the capital; and it is not generally known that the two edifices which have added most since his time to the embellishment of the metropolis, and of which the Revolution and the Empire would fain take the credit-the Pantheon and the Madeleine —were begun in 1764 by Louis XV., and owe their origin to the magnificent ideas which Louis XIV. transmitted to his, in other respects, unworthy descendant.*

12.

Had one dark and atrocious transaction not taken place, the annalist might have stopped here, and painted the French monarch, with a few foibles and weak

nesses, the common bequest of mortality, yet still,

Atrocity of the revocation

of the Edict of

Nantes.

His ambi

upon the whole, a noble and magnanimous ruler. tion, great as it was, and desolating as it proved, both to the adjoining states, and, in the end, to his own subjects, was the "last infirmity of noble minds." He shared it with Cæsar and Alexander, with Charlemagne and Napoleon. Even his cruel and unnecessary ravaging of the Palatinate, though attended with dreadful private suffering, has too many parallels

* "La Madeleine comme le Pantheon avait été commencée la même année en 1764, par les ordres de Louis XV., le roi des grands monumens, et dont le regne a été travesti par la petite histoire."-CAPEFIGUE, Histoire de Louis Philippe, viii., 281.

in the annals of military cruelty. His accession to the league of 1700 for the partition of Spain was a violent stretch of ambition, and carried into execution with equal duplicity and perfidy; but these were directed against the hereditary enemy of France, and the annals of diplomacy in all ages prove that violations of state morality are too frequent among governments. His personal vanities and weaknesses, his love of show, his passion for women, his extravagant expenses, were common to him with his grandfather, Henry IV.: they seemed inherent in the Bourbon race, and are the frailties to which heroic minds in every age have been most subject. But, for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the heart-rending cruelties with which it was carried into execution, no such apology can be found it admits neither of palliation nor excuse. Were it not for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the expulsion of the Morescoes from Spain, it would stand foremost in the annals of the world as an example of kingly perfidy and priestly cruelty.

13.

Which pro

duced the reaction against him that

checked his

The expulsion of four hundred thousand innocent human beings from their country, for no other cause but difference of religious opinion; the destruction of nearly a hundred thousand, of whom it is said a tenth perished by the frightful tortures of the power. wheel and the stake-the wholesale desolation of provinces and destruction of cities for conscience' sake, never will and never should be forgotten. It is the eternal disgrace of the Roman Catholic religion—a disgrace to which the " execrations of ages have not yet affixed an adequate censure”—that all these infamous state crimes took their origin in the bigoted zeal or sanguinary ambition of the Church of Rome. Nor have any of them passed without their just reward. The expulsion of the Moors, the most industrious and valuable inhabitants of the Peninsula, has entailed a weakness upon the Spanish monarchy, which the subsequent lapse of two centuries has been unable to repair. The reaction against the Romish atrocities produced the great league of which Will