to have assisted in the unification of Italy, or the liberation of the Christian states of the Balkan Peninsula. At the end of the seventeenth century it was quite otherwise. To establish beyond all question the authority of the crown, to maintain a powerful and perfectly equipped army, to astonish the world by the splendour of the court, to push ever further and further away the frontiers of the nation, to extend a lordly protection, little short of vassalage, to weaker countries,--such were the objects of a patriot king, such the rewards of successful statesmanship. The nation was focussed and crystallised into the person of the king. It worked, fought, lived, conquered for him alone. In his glory it saw its own reflected, it recognised him as its representative and its champion, it surrendered its independence to him ungrudgingly, and in his success it reaped its reward. The rights of peoples were not so much set aside, as not even thought of, for everything was absorbed in the personality of the king. [Sidenote: =Louis XIV. the type of seventeenth century kingship.=] Of this type of kingship Louis XIV. is always looked upon as the representative if not the founder. Its founder he certainly was not, for his was not the mind to found anything. There is nothing original, no initiative, about Louis XIV. He can use, he cannot produce. The productive power seems wholly wanting in him. He is essentially a barren man, singularly skilful in making use of the material with which he is provided, but unable to add to it. It has often been pointed out how he inherited everything which has made him great, and left nothing great behind him. Condé and Turenne, Lionne and Servien, Colbert, Corneille, and Racine were the products of the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, and only utilised by Louis, while Villeroy and Tallard and Boileau were the work of his own hands. [Sidenote: =Louis a man of second-rate abilities.=] The statement requires some modification, but the principle which underlies it is true. Nearly everything which was great in France at the time of his accession to power Louis had the ability to use. For the most part what became great in France during his reign was not trained by him, and indeed in the case of Port Royal attained its greatness in spite of him, and what was directly trained by him was not great. The reason is not far to seek. It is the vice of an absolutely centralised monarchy, where the king is all in all, that it cannot in the nature of things tolerate any one greater than the king. The ministers are servants, and no servant can be greater than his master. [Sidenote: =His determination to admit of no rival.=] Even in the Prussian monarchy of to-day there is no room for a Bismarck, still less could one have been permitted to exist at the court of Louis XIV. An absolute monarch sets the standard of his ministers, if he absorbs the whole state into himself as did Louis, and does not merely let things govern themselves as is