When Addison landed in France, in 1699, the power of Louis XIV., so long the determined enemy of the English Revolution of 1688, had passed its climax. The Peace of Ryswick, by which the hopes of the Jacobites were finally demolished, was two years old. The king, disappointed in his dreams of boundless military glory, had fallen into a fit of devotion, and Addison, arriving from England with a very imperfect knowledge of the language, was astonished to find the whole of French literature saturated with the royal taste. "As for the state of learning," says he, in a letter to Montague, dated August, 1699, "there is no book comes out at present that has not something in it of an air of devotion. Dacier has bin forced to prove his Plato a very good Christian before he ventures upon his translation, and has so far comply'd with y{e} tast of the age that his whole book is overrun with texts of Scripture, and y{e} notion of præ-existence, supposed to be stolen from two verses of y{e} prophets. Nay, y{e} humour is grown so universal that it is got among y{e} poets, who are every day publishing Lives of Saints and Legends in Rhime." Finding, perhaps, that the conversation at the capital was not very congenial to his taste, he seems to have hurried on to Blois, a town then noted for the purity with which its inhabitants spoke the French language, and where he had determined to make his temporary abode. His only record of his first impressions of Paris is a casual criticism of "y{e} King's Statue that is lately set up in the Place Vendome." He visited, however, both Versailles and Fontainebleau, and the preference which he gives to the latter (in a letter to Congreve) is interesting, as anticipating that taste for natural as opposed to artificial beauty which he afterwards expressed in the _Spectator_.