Rome deposed from the throne of universal faith was to be recompensed by the sceptre of universal culture. So when France was assuming the headship of Europe, and was preparing to strike for the dominion of the civilised world, her court was to be the epitome, the representation of the world’s greatness. Mirrored there in a tiny but radiant sphere was to be found all which makes humanity noble and life beautiful. Intellect and birth, genius and beauty, culture and statesmanship, art and devotion, all were to be there marshalled in an admirable perfection of order, but shining one and all with a reflected light, illuminated by the rays of the king, their sun. Not unthinkingly did Louis adopt the sun as his type. According to his theory of government he was the centre, the life-giving principle of the system in which he ruled. All that was young and beautiful in France sprang into life at his bidding, and withered into decay when he averted his face, all that was powerful drew its vigour from his favour, while from less privileged lands the kings of the earth, like the Magi of old, drawn by the light of his compelling rays, were to come from the ends of the world to find under his protecting care the pattern of life and the home of faith. [Sidenote: =Truth of Thackeray’s caricature.=] Sarcasm comes easy to the lips when dealing with a theory such as this. Men cannot stop the course of the winds of heaven by building houses of cards, and no artificial arrangements of a court can conceal national weakness or physical decay. The sturdy English pencil of Thackeray has drawn out the hollowness of this theory of seventeenth century kingship in the bitter sarcasm of the well-known sketches of _Louis le Roi_ in his later years. In the first appears the real _Louis_, insignificant, decrepit, bald, and old, shaking and feeble with age, a living corpse rather than a man. Opposite to him stands _le Roi_--the flowing peruke curled and oiled, the royal robes bedecked with ribbons, flashing with jewels, the tailor-made divinity that doth hedge a king, standing ready for the monarch’s use on its skeleton frame. Lastly we see the human atom and its gorgeous artificial covering united in _Louis le Roi_, and are bidden to reflect how much of the _Grand Monarque_ is the work of the tailor and the wigmaker, and how little of God. The argument is true, the sarcasm is just. Where the splendour of a court is part of the system of government, represents and enforces the national dignity, sets the fashion to foreign ambition, is the living embodiment of the power and genius of the state, king and courtiers must not grow old. Queen Elizabeth, encouraging protestations of love at the age of seventy, and Louis XIV. attempting artificially to conceal the advance of years, are spectacles offensive because unnaturally theatrical. [Sidenote: =The French court at the head of civilisation.=] But their loathsomeness never struck contemporaries as it does us. Louis XIV.