This tendency on the part of Commines to praise the princes who successively enjoyed his aid and allegiance, is thus noticed by Sir James Stephen:—“He regards Charles the Rash with that affectionate interest which the heroism even of the unwise will excite in the bosoms of the wisest. He contemplates Louis XI. with that combination of curiosity, attachment, and awe, which minds of more than ordinary power so often cherish for each other. The images of the fiery duke and of the crafty king were projected in bold relief on the imagination of this acute and vigilant observer; and the truth and distinctness of those images forms the great charm of his retrospect of his own eventful life. The higher charm of a just sensibility, whether to moral beauty or to the absence of it, is, however, wanting in his pages. He is the unqualified admirer, if not the unscrupulous apologist, of his royal master, and seems insensible alike to the injustice of the ends at which he aimed, and to the baseness of the means by which he pursued them. Yet man is not less inconsistent in his faults and errors than in his virtues, and thus, even the utilitarian Commines is unable to survey the revolutions in which he so largely participated without an occasional, and apparently heartfelt acknowledgment that, in bringing to pass the disastrous catastrophes of the world’s history, the will and agency of man are but instruments by which the Divine will accomplishes its immutable purposes of wisdom and of justice. In the subtlety of his analysis of the great characters of his generation—in the force and discrimination of his portraits of them—in the sagacity with which he explores, and the perspicuity with which he interprets, the hidden causes of the events in which they acted,—and in the vigorous dispersion of the mists with which ignorance or passion obscures the true aspect of human affairs, Commines is emphatically a Frenchman. In the reverence with which, on reaching the impassable limits of human investigation, he ceases to inquire, and pauses to adore, he rises higher still, and becomes not only a citizen, but a teacher of the great Christian Commonwealth.”[2]