All Fénelon’s writings, it may be said, show much grandeur and delicacy of sentiment, great fertility of genius, a correct taste, and excited sensibility. A poetical character appears in them all. By assiduous study the works of the best writers of antiquity were familiar to him, and his intimate acquaintance with their productions furnished him a resource in every vicissitude of life; they were his ornament in prosperity, his comfort in adversity. The charm of his manner in society is largely communicated to the products of his pen. They abound in passages of splendor and pathos, but their chief excellence is in their tender simplicity, by which the reader’s heart is irresistibly drawn to the writer. Of much higher rank in a literary point of view than any of those previously mentioned was his “Adventures of Telemachus; or, The Education of a Prince.” It is a fabulous narrative in the form of a heroic poem, in which he sets down the truths most necessary to be known by one about to reign; and the faults that cling most closely to sovereign power are also fully described. It was composed by Fénelon while he was preceptor to the royal dukes, and designed exclusively for their instruction; “written at chance moments, hurriedly, and piece by piece,” says the author, “sent to the press by an unfaithful copyist, and never intended for the world.” He insisted that he did not borrow from real persons, or sketch in the characters of his own time. This was undoubtedly true; but no human power could convince Louis XIV that it was so, and the unauthorized publication of it in 1698, just when the Quietist controversy was at its height, was extremely unfortunate for Fénelon, and filled the king’s cup of wrath to overflowing. He had been more than sufficiently embittered before, but after this there was not the slightest hope of reconciliation; for the book is an idealistic portrayal of a commonwealth where virtue has its own again, where there is no tyranny, where the king is the father of all his people and the chief servant of the State, where duty is lifted far above rights, and justice is supreme. Since nothing could be more opposite to all this than the character and conduct of King Louis, it is no wonder that he took it as a personal insult and a deliberate satire. In every part of it disrespectful mention is made of ambition, of extensive conquests, of military fame, of magnificence, and of almost everything else which Louis considered as the glory of his reign. While the author must be acquitted of any intention to affront the monarch, which would have been most ungrateful and most ridiculous, it is evident that he must have had unconsciously in mind the principal actors in the scenes around him, was wholly out of sympathy with them, and was training the young princes on a totally different model. The book, suppressed, of course, in Paris, was brought out at once in Holland, and became everywhere the rage,